Trend Micro, a leader in network antivirus and content security software and services, has warned readers of blogs to exercise extra precaution while surfing on the net.

Online journals, known as weblogs or “blogs”, allow writers to share their thoughts with a wide online readership. Unfortunately, such websites have also become the target of criminals who insert malicious software – “malware” – into the pages themselves.

In a disturbing twist to the practice, opportunists have taken the opportunity to hijack legitimate sites during the recent sequence of public holidays, guaranteeing control while regular maintenance teams are away, it said.

“Users should be extra careful when they fire up their computers in 2008,” said Samir Kirouani, senior technical engineer, Trend Micro Middle East and Africa. “Cyber-criminals are enticing their victims by organising the infection of seasonal or topical web pages at peak times,” he added.

Experts are detecting all manner of timely material being manipulated, from holiday recipes to current affairs stories. This both attracts curious browsers and drives up the popularity of the dangerous sites. Known as “SEO poisoning”, the process is self-reproducing, making infected pages more popular in search engine rankings. In turn, this means that infected pages are more likely to be stumbled across by casual users, he said.

According to Kirouani, the explosive growth of internet use in the Middle East makes the region especially vulnerable to this type of attack. “What is especially disturbing is that those infecting weblogs and other sites during the vacation appear to be playing a long game,” he said. “The capture of numerous web pages, and the collation of information on their visitors, has not had an immediate impact, suggesting something sinister is being arranged for later in the year.”

He recommended that users adopt a reliable network security package which can assess the reputation of individual websites. – TradeArabia News Service