Why Do People Create Internet Hoaxes?

[Peaches]

Jul8-2010

Why Do People Create Internet Hoaxes?

OK. So, a lot of the events written above are fictional. The chances of a hacker actually blowing up something in the real world are pretty slim but cybercriminals use the exact same attack model every day. If you came across an Internet hoax in the past year or so, chances are that it was related to a targeted SEO attack.

The scenario is quite simple:

• Cybercriminals want to direct as many victims as possible to their malicious pages.
• Cybercriminals know users are interested in celebrities and current events.

Unfortunately for cybercriminals, the likelihood of making their sites one of the top 10 search results for a particular celebrity is very low. After all, the top 10 will be taken up by legitimate sites related to that person.

However, if cybercriminals first poison a search term related to that person (for example, searches related to the deaths of Eminem, Bill Cosby, or Johnny Depp) then start to circulate the corresponding hoax via email and social networking sites, they can suddenly use the celebrities' popularity to attract people to their malicious attack pages.

While Internet hoaxes have certainly been around much longer than SEO poisoning, they do provide an extra weapon for cybercriminals—using an old trick in order to make a profit. While the stories are completely bogus, they are designed to make readers fire off a quick online search that will lead them to cybercriminals' pages.

Obviously, the story at the start was the more "Hollywood" version of such as attack. If any studio is interested, give me a call but anytime you come across a story that seems too shocking to be true, think before you click that search result.

Interesting story - http://blog.trendmicro.com/