Microsoft Bing Provides Detailed Warnings On Phishing Sites, Malware

Microsoft's search engine Bing will display more detailed warnings when users encounter potential phishing and malware sites, as incidents continue to rise.

The news reported Friday in a blog post details how the search engine will change the way it communicates potential threats in search engine query results to individuals using its engine and webmasters using its ad and site tools.

The most significant change involves how Webmasters will receive notifications when a site becomes infected and by what type of infection. Bing will send a notification through the search engine's dashboard when a threat is detected on a company's site. After the webmasters addresses the concern, users can request a review of the status.

For those searching on Bing, the engine will identify whether the page ahead contains a phishing scam and in some cases will explain how the site might trick the individual into disclosing financial, personal, or other sensitive information.

Previously, Bing warned individuals using its search engine with a generic warning covering all of the different malware threat types.

Microsoft will allow the user to click through to the site, but will recommend that the individual pick another result.

Poisoning search results through search engine optimization (SEO) has also been identified by Infoblox, a firm offering security appliances for large companies, as a technique to drive traffic to malware exploit kits, as have several large spam attacks. 

A Infoblox white paper calling out Google -- which also has been working to stop malware and phishing through search results -- cites Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that ransomware attacks cost U.S. victims $209 million in the first quarter of 2016 compared with $24 million for all of 2015. 

Google began urging Web site operators to sign up for security notifications after a study of 760,935 hijacked sites conducted with the University of California, Berkeley, between late 2013 and early 2014, revealed the difficulties in cleaning up infections that expose visitors to malware.

Fast forward to 2016 and the problem continues to escalate in a variety of media. AppRiver quarantined more than 2.3 billion messages and virus with more than 1.7 billion occurring in March 2016, already surpassing last year’s total virus traffic according to the company’s Q1 Global Security Report. 

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