Windows Live is “everything you need, all in one place” and it looks like the search engine really does know what exactly it is that Italians need! Today, we came across a story that was reported by Sunbelt about a takeover of the Italian version of the Windows Live search engine. We decided to do a bit more investigating into those rumors.
At the moment, the problem is that when someone searches a combination of specific Italian keywords on the Windows Live portal, that person will always get a set of weird links in the search results. These weird links will most likely be related to the Linkoptimizer gang (aka Gromozon)—so this likely means that the Gromozon gang has managed to take over and manipulate the search results of Windows Live by getting their links to end up on the top of the search result lists.
This morning we received reports of spammed emails with the following bodies:
John Howard survived a heart attack Read more: http://wi[REMOVED]news.hk
Prime Minister survived a heard attack Read more: http://in[REMOVED]help.hk
Once again, it’s the usual attack that tries to lead victims to a Web site that hosts an exploit code. In this case, attackers also added some additional social engineering fun to pursue their criminal purposes. In fact, when someone visits the hostile Web site, it will show a false “502” error and will gently suggest shutting down firewall and antivirus software to avoid the problem. (Of course! What else? Do you want my credit card number? Send money to your bank?).
