Patrick Walsh, CTO of network security firm eSoft, alerted readers of his Infosecurity blog about poisoned Google search results stemming from the Hotmail outage. He noted that eight of the top 10 search results for ‘hotmail service unavailable’ resulted in links to potentially malicious URLs.
Walsh's examination of a Google Trends report indicated search terms relating to the Hotmail outage were among the most popular for the day, with all leading to compromised links intending to deliver malware to unsuspecting web browsers. “Blackhats have once again worked their magic to infect users looking for news related to the outage”, said Walsh.
Other links in the top Google search results attempt to lure users into downloading files, but, as Walsh noted, “not before entering their credit card information.”