Windows 7: Don't click that link, but if you do...

Here, briefly, are two more issues that belong in the non-existent User Guide to the Internet.

Issue one: You can't trust Google search results.

Any time an event or story becomes brutally popular, bad guys make customized malicious web pages and trick Google into displaying these bad web pages near the top of search results for the popular event or story.

This just happened with the Tiger Woods commercial where we hear the voice of his dead father talking to him.

Haven't seen the commercial? Be very careful doing a Google search for "tiger woods commercial".

The danger in this particular search was just documented by Lee Gaves of eSoft. According to his research, six of the top seven search results "lead to Fake Anti-Virus pages begging the user to install malicious software. The video results have also been poisoned to do the same." Six of the top seven*. Yikes.

What to do?

One way to protect yourself from malicious web sites/pages is the free Web Of Trust add-on for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Web of Trust lets users rate the safety of websites and displays the ratings in a number of places. One place the ratings appear are the search results in Google.

As shown below, a green circle means the website (sports.espn.go.com in this case) is considered safe and a yellow circle (sportzu.tv in the example) means proceed with caution. Sites with red circles should be avoided. The gray circle with a question mark means there are not enough ratings to form an opinion. One reason for this might be that the website is new.

Warning! Cybercriminals are using the news about Polish tradegy by creating lots of bogus domains relating to searches about the plane crash in Smoleńsk where the Polish President died

A malicious advertisement has been found within an application for Facebook that redirected users to fake antivirus software, according to a security researcher.

The banner advertisement for greeting cards was intermittently displayed with an application called Farm Town, which has more than 9 million monthly users according to information published on Facebook.