Friday the 13th
It’s the scary season once again; a time for dressing up as something ghastly and making merry in a ghoulish manner while handing out candy to children… that sounded better in my head.
Any way, it’s Halloween and while the celebratory day of All Hallow’s Eve may not be quite as big over here in the UK as it is in the US (they’ve been preparing for it for weeks) we Brits still use the event as an excuse for a party and to watch horror films. As with any Halloween, there are a lot of new horror movies coming out especially to scare the bejesus out of you and, just like any event of any significance, the black hat SEOs are there too, waiting to surprise you with their fiendish traps.
Online security firm PandaLabs has revealed that Halloween movie releases may lead to more of a scare than originally intended.
According to the security form, black hat SEOs have been preparing for Halloween longer than most Americans and have been targeting scary movies such as Friday the 13th and Paranormal Activity 2 with their SEO campaigns. The unpleasant fellows have been optimising websites for phrases related to these films knowing that unsuspecting Internet surfers, looking for a scare in the shape of a trailer or series of stills for the movies, can be royally shocked by downloading malware and other nasties instead.
Through the use of black hat SEO techniques, fake websites promising information related to the films are being promoted by the spammers to trap unsuspecting horror film fans. When fans find one of the fake websites, instead of watching a trailer or sneak peak of the film in question, they find their computer infected with a virus, Trojan or other form of malware, such as spyware or adware.
You can see some examples of the type of websites that appear in the search results from PandaLabs here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5116727543/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5116727615/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5116727397/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5116735747/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/panda_security/5117329440/
So if you’re surfing the Internet today, or in the darkness later tonight, be very careful what you click on… take a wrong turn and you could find your computer infected with diseased, brain eating zombies!
Or more likely experience a series of pop-ups for some medications that you probably don’t want.