Markus Selinger: “A detailed AV-TEST study recently revealed that although search engine operators such as Google and Bing make a lot of effort to avoid doing so, they sometimes deliver websites infected with Trojans and similar malware among their top search results. Other search engines do an even worse job. Malware developers are now putting more and more effort into their work, for example in order to distribute their spyware programs or Trojans. They therefore exploit search engines for their own purposes and sneak infected websites into the top results delivered to users. The trick used by these criminals is actually very simple: they first create a multitude of small websites and blogs before selecting the most frequently used search terms from top news stories and using backlinks to optimise these terms for search engines. This process of optimising websites for search engines, known as SEO (search engine optimisation) for short, is used by all major website operators to ensure that their sites are easier to find. The way to ensure that a web site is the quickest to be found is to achieve a place in the top ten search results delivered by Bing or Google.”