Pondering Minstrel

Friday, May 06, 2005

CAREFUL HOW YOU GOOGLE

Remember the days when typosquatters only put out porn at places like whitehouse.com when you really wanted whitehouse.gov? Well, the days of carefree web surfing are gone. Typosquatters turn vicious, according to this eWeek article.

From the article:
"The malicious site, googkle.com, is infested with Trojan droppers, downloaders, backdoors and spyware, and an unsuspecting user only has to visit the page to be at risk of computer hijack attacks... When googkle.com is opened in a browser... files are downloaded using exploits and they contain exploits themselves to run embedded executable files... One batch of exploits loads a malware package that includes two backdoors, two Trojan droppers, a proxy Trojan, a spying Trojan and a Trojan downloader."


This website primarily seems to attack MSIE users, so if you're using Firefox, you're probably safe. If you're using IE, follow the steps below to restrict the site. It won't completely block the site, but if you accidentally end up there, it will give you the highest level of security in IE to prevent unwanted downloads and such.
  1. From the menus, go to Tools ->Internet Options
  2. Click the "Security" tab
  3. Click the "Restricted Sites" icon. It's a big, red, round circle with a white line through it.
  4. Click the "Sites" button
  5. Add www.googkle.com and googkle.com to the list