Gray Powell's unfortunate legacy: SEO poisoning and malware

Filed under: Security, iPhone

There's been no shortage of blog coverage about the stray iPhone left behind by Apple engineer Gray Powell in a California bar last month. While gadget and Apple blogs have been busily covering every possible piece of minutia around the incident, the device, and whether or not Mr. Powell wears black turtlenecks, the crew at Help Net Security was doing a different kind of digging.

This is a hot topic right now, and Gizmodo's now-infamous post has created loads of juicy targets for the lowlifes who practice SEO poisoning -- injecting links to malicious sites and malware into search results on sites like Google and Bing.

Help Net tried searching for Gray Powell on Google and found that the first page of results returned 4 malicious links. Out of 10. Ouch. More disconcerting is that fact that only one quarter of the engines used by Virustotal.com detected the malware being served -- double ouch.

So Powell's unfortunate legacy (which of course has absolutely nothing to do with the man himself) will ultimately be thousands and thousands of Windows PCs infected with malware by users who just aren't paying enough attention to what they click.

I'm guessing Apple is only a little bit sad about that prospect. Or perhaps not.

Gray Powell's unfortunate legacy: SEO poisoning and malware originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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