Bing helps keep the web safer with malware filter

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From the Bing Blog:

Bing and Security:

We at Bing absolutely believe that security is one of our top priorities. We will keep investing in security, as one of our primary goals is to protect and secure our users and provide them a safe search experience.

 

What have we noticed in Bing?

 

Over the last year, we have seen an increase in social engineering malware. Malware providers mostly target popular search queries on anti-virus products, free software downloads and related technical queries. Their intent is to game the search engine to show their malware sites as top results for the popular queries. This is done by using various search engine spam techniques (page level and link level spam techniques). We have also noticed that number of searches for the queries the malware providers target, for example: anti-virus products in various forms is significant and consistently show up in our list of top queries.

 

What is the good news for Bing users?

 

In response to this growing threat, Bing has invested in ways to identify and filter sites that download malicious software. We call this Malware Filter. This feature compliments our pre-existing Drive-By-Download detection by identifying and removing social engineering malware sites from our results. We can block new threats from existing malicious sites, even if those threats are not yet blocked by traditional anti-virus or anti-malware signatures. Here are some examples of what sites we are blocking and how they might infect our users with what they download:

 

Common examples of what users think they are downloading:

 

  •   Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware products
  •  Free videos, codecs & images
  •  Utilities or other software
  • Online greeting cards
  • Games

 

 

 

 

Here’s the types of files users are actually trying to download:

  • Viruses
  • Spyware
  • Adware
  • Trojans
  • Backdoors
  • Dialers
  • Worms
  • Downloaders
  • Password stealers
  • Monitoring software

 

From our analysis on sites blocked by our malware filter, a significant portion of the malware sites are fake anti-virus product sites. This effort is going to protect our users in a significant way as we have already pointed out that number of searches for anti-virus products in various forms is quite significant.

For comprehensive protection from malware, we highly recommend that users also install traditional anti-virus products and keep them up to date.

 

How can you help Bing?

 

Please report sites that you think may be malicious using Bing feedback.

  

We’re committed to protecting our users from the attacks of today and the attacks of the future. Please stay tuned for more blogs on our security endeavours to protect our users and keep the internet a safe place to search.

~Sasi Parthasarathy, Bing Index Quality Group