PandaLabs has identified thousands of links designed to target searchers looking for information on recently popular targets. With the goal of infecting unsuspecting victims with scareware, Twitter recently has also been bombarded with trending spam.

Blackhat SEOs targeting Google search results came to light this spring to redirect trusting users to scareware sites—sites falsely warning targets of viruses on their machine, offering fake system scans, promoting expensive fake anti-virus programs, and installing Trojans.

MessageLabs Intelligence released some new  information today indicating that the assumption that most web-based malware resides on fly-by-night websites touting adult content, is an "old-fashioned notion."

Instead, a MessageLabs (part of Symantec) spokesperson tells WebProNews that cybercriminals are more likely to be hiding on legitimate web sites tha have been compromised.

Data from the week of May 5th shows that:

UPDATE: Since this post was first published, Google has said an algorithm change is pending to address the problem. Read more about that here.

There has been a lot of talk recently about browsers and the maneuvering that is occurring in that space due to new releases and expiring agreements and more.

Obviously, cyber crooks wouldn’t do what they do if there wasn’t any money in it. Thanks to some black-hat search engine optimization and a little rogueware (a.k.a. scareware), some are making almost $11,000 a day, according to FinJan’s first Cybercrime Intelligence Report for 2009.

As far as malware tricks go, this one is pretty diabolical. Over the weekend, Facebook users started receiving messages saying friends had tried to view their profile but were unable to do so. The message prompts the user to install a third party app, oddly titled “Error Check System.”

The actual text of the message reads: “[Name] has faced some errors when checking your profile View The Errors Message.”

Over the weekend, Twitter suffered from some security problems that fell more on the mischievous than malicious side of things.  Now, the sort of social media trouble quotient appears to have risen a bit as fake LinkedIn profiles are trying to send users towards malware.

About two years behind Google, Microsoft has finally decided to start marking malicious sites in the search results for Live Search. Better late than never though, I suppose.

Gotta hand it to the Web bandits. Buying AdWords is a brazen new realm for them. A paid link leading to a dangerous malware-laden download targeted President-Elect Obama’s sweeping victory.

The ad, which according to the screenshot at security company Sophos blog achieved top placement for the keyword phrase “Obama win,” clicked out to a “rogue” site and a download prompt for an installer that is “100% checked by Antivirus.”

Be careful with Google conspiracy accusations; Matt Cutts might make an example of you. After being accused of blocking anti-Net Neutrality pages on the Progress and Freedom Foundation site, Cutts gloats over data to the contrary on his blog.

Brett Glass, via Dan Farber’s Interesting People mailing list, discovered only pages on PFF.org’s website pertaining to Network Neutrality were flagged by Google as hosting malware. Once flagged, Google gandalfs the old "you shall not pass" command, barring searchers from accessing the infected page via search results.

If you go down StopBadware.org’s top ten most malware infected network list, you’ll notice a pattern: the first four are Chinese. While the critic may find that unsurprising, number five on the list, Google, Inc., is worth a double take.

Google isn’t just one of the founders of StopBadware.org, it’s also a member. The company, in a weird twist, is also its own target. Google has its free blogging service Blogger to thank for all that junk gumming up its own network. Out of over 200,000 websites discovered to be infected, Blogger returned 4,261 infections.

Webmasters this week were greeted with an "oops, not working" error when they tried using Google’s Malware Review form.

The form that was introduced last year in August to help webmasters solve issues of malware or badware, faced some technical problems this week and this was first reported at around 1 am on May 15th.

Last Tuesday, Google published a report stating that web browsing and searching are increasingly becoming risky. Google for a year and a half now has been identifying web pages that infect vulnerable hosts via drive-by downloads, i.e. web pages that attempt to exploit their visitors by installing and running malware automatically.

Research by Google’s anti-malware team found more than three million unique URLs on more than 180,000 Web sites that automatically install malware.

Security Watch is reporting a new MySpace security issue that could reasonably make someone’s day unhappy. The idea behind the hack is to send an authentic looking patch from Microsoft to a person’s computer, once they have clicked on a link to view a person’s profile.

Zango’s at it again, showing the company will stoop to any level to serve pop-up ads to people that don’t want them. What’s being dubbed by security experts as a malicious social worm is brought to you via Zango and Facebook’s open platform.

Blogger links that purport to lead to video of Benazir Bhutto’s last moments alive go to a fake video codec and an all too familiar exploit.

Google has expunged more than 40,000 websites from its search index, removing a ton of sites because they contain malware.

Google has taken steps to remove malware websites from its search results, according to a ComputerWorld article released Wednesday.

Google has shown itself to be the strong, silent type, and quick, too – in about two days’ time, the company cleaned up what one individual called “massive amounts of malware redirects” without bothering to say a word about it.

Compared to murder, malware isn’t so bad.  It’s not exactly good, though, and in a development that can’t please Google, it’s been connected to DoubleClick.