Black Hat Spam SEO

Google Tech Talk September 2, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Julien Sobrier. For some time, attackers have leveraged Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in order to promote malicious web content targeting end users. Google has researched this phenomenon and recently announced that fake antivirus pages now represent 60% of the malware associated with popular search terms and these attacks continue to grow in prevalence. The Zscaler Research Team has also shown that some popular search terms from Google Trends, have malicious links to fake antivirus pages in up to 90% of all links within the first 100 results returned. Attackers have even managed to display malicious links as the first result for popular searches. Moreover, we have found that more than 50% of popular searches contain at least one malicious spam SEO link in the first 10 pages. Is Google doing enough to protect its users? In this talk, we'll debate that question. Julien Sobrier, from Zscaler, will talk about Blackhat spam SEO on Thursday 09/02 and address the following: • What is Blackhat spam SEO? • How do attackers leverage spam SEO? • How prevalent are spam SEO attacks? • What different types of attacks are involved? • What can search engines do to better protect end users? • How can end users protect themselves?