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Poisoned Google image searches becoming a problem
- m0nastic 16y agoJust noticed this for the first time tonight. I was ordering Chinese food and wanted to try something new, so I Google image searched for a couple of dishes. Almost every one I clicked on tried to install malware. For the record, apparently Beef Chow Foon is an attractive malware target.
- jerrya 16y agoI saw this today for the first time as well. In a thread about why the US would inflate the cost of Bin Laden's mansion, I did a GIS for James Bond Bambi Thumper, found an image, clicked, and it was a anit-virus malware scam site.
- ElbertF 16y agoSilly me, I had to go see it for myself and now my Linux machine is apparently affected: http://i.imgur.com/YVE3e.png http://i.imgur.com/YVE3e.png. Funny that they chose "opensuse-antivirus" as the domain name.
- calebmpeterson 16y agoI've been seeing this behavior from Google Image Search for a few months now
- biot 16y agoA great feature would be for Google to retain the checksum of the page at the time it was indexed and pass that along to the browser (eg: Chrome). If the checksums don't match, the browser can do a background call for Google to re-fetch the page and recalculate the checksum. If the checksums still don't match display a warning message to the user. There would likely be some work required to weed out false positives from things like dynamic content, so perhaps only non-text parts should be checksummed... but if one of the biggest issues is malware sites serving up an innocuous page to Google crawlers instead of the malware-filled page that is served to users, something like that would be a good initial sanity check.
- benologist 16y agoGoogle Image search has always been pretty dodgy for me. It's obvious a lot of sites are gaming it w/ celebrity pics for instance, the resulting pages often don't have the image or they break out of the google previewing frame and go to a paid registration page for whatever site.