It’s not uncommon for us to see cyber criminals targeting current events or upcoming holidays, but this time we came across a campaign that is several months ahead of schedule. An ongoing Blackhat SEO campaign is heavily targeting Halloween and Thanksgiving related keywords.
The Top 5 targeted keywords:
1. Printable (cards)
2. Halloween
3. Thanksgiving
4. Invitations
5. Turkey
Tag cloud of the 75 most targeted keywords:
![Blackhat SEO targeting Halloween and Thanksgiving Blackhat SEO targeting Halloween and Thanksgiving](/en/mediacenter/src/uploads/2010/08/ScreenHunter_11-Aug.-13-14.04.jpg)
Searching for any of the targeted phrases could yield the following search results:
![Halloween/Thanksgiving Blackhat SEO Search Results Halloween/Thanksgiving Blackhat SEO Search Results](/en/mediacenter/src/uploads/2010/08/ScreenHunter_13-Aug.-13-14.15.jpg)
Clicking on any of the search results will lead us to the Desktop Security 2010 Rogueware campaign, which does a number of annoying things, such as hijacking web browsing sessions, repeatedly playing messages over the speakers (E.g. Your computer is infected), and generating popups.
![Desktop Security 2010 Rogueware Desktop Security 2010 Rogueware](/en/mediacenter/src/uploads/2010/08/ScreenHunter_06-Aug.-13-13.39.jpg)
![Desktop Security 2010 Purchase Page Desktop Security 2010 Purchase Page](/en/mediacenter/src/uploads/2010/08/ScreenHunter_07-Aug.-13-13.42.jpg)
3 comments
I hate those browser hijackers! Doesn’t Google block those kinds of websites?