Google, Bing, and other engines appear to be having trouble filtering malware on their search ad services. As discovered by user FuzzyCard121 from Reddit on Tuesday (10), the platforms are displaying malicious websites posing as AMD’s official homepage when searching for popular terms like “AMD drivers”.
Criminals don’t need much effort to reach their victims: it’s enough to create a web page similar to that of a company or service and pay for the advertisement in search engines. Google, Bing and others in the category should filter this type of content before showing it to their millions of users — which is not happening.
Sites that pay to appear at the top of search results have a discreet label on their link that it is an ad, and are usually shown based on the text entered by the user. In this case, results are displayed when searching for AMD graphics card software.
TudoCelular tried to search for the links in question, but Google and Bing appear to have removed content from the paid results area, indicating that the public used the reporting mechanism to take malicious pages offline. Now, the hardware manufacturer’s official website is displayed when searching for “AMD driver”.
It should be noted that this practice is not new. Also in December, we reported the discovery of a fake MasterCard website that stole victims’ banking details by entering their information into text fields that posed as a login form. This platform was among the Google sponsored sites.
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While search engines do not improve their security policy to block this type of content, the recommendation is that users access the official website of AMD — or any other desired company — to download software, find support, purchase products, subscribe to services and carry out other actions.
When accessing AMD’s official website address (“www.amd.com”), for example, the “Downloads and Support” section will be displayed in the top menu of the home page. Also, it’s always worth keeping antivirus software installed on your device.
