Microsoft Yanks Security Site Poisoned With Porn

CWmike writes "Microsoft disabled the search tool on its Safety & Security Center on Saturday after attackers poisoned results with links to pornographic URLs. The company restored the website's search field early Monday afternoon ET. Alex Eckelberry, the general manager of GFI Software's security group and CEO of Sunbelt Software, said search poisoning is not unusual — but this is different. 'This is crafty,' Eckelberry said. 'This isn't normal search poisoning. It's poisoning the results with actual searches. Users were getting back a prior search as a search result.'"

Re:Bad Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Not hacked, poisoned. The search engine's features have been manipulated in such a way to produce the results. Clever, but no hacking took place.

Stupid is an infinite resource

[interkin3tic]

searches using terms like "sex," "porn," "girl" and "streaming" on the Microsoft [Safety & Security Center] site were returning links to pornographic websites at or near the top of the results list

1. Put links to your porn site in MS' safety and security center search bar
2.Wait for people to search for porn in the safety and security center search bar
3.???
4. PROFIT!!!

I want to believe that this is just some automated process that searches the web for search bars and then tries to put in their own porn links. Alternatively, I want to believe that this is just a few porn marketers who are so dumb, they put links to their porn sites in a search field for MS safety and security. But I can't convince myself.

It's depressing to realize that there are actually people dumb enough to go to an antivirus website and start searching for porn.

"Dang! I musta gotten a virus! Don't know how, all I've been doing with this here computer is lookin up pictures of nekkid ladies. Well, better look for something to fix this from microsoft.... boring boring boring, I wanna see nekkid ladies! OOH! PORN!!"