A significant web hijacking campaign, which involved tricking people into visiting malicious websites, has been thwarted, the BBC reports.The malicious websites used by the hackers would come up in search results when internet users typed in terms such as 'hospice', 'Christmas gifts' and 'infinity'.
According to the BBC, criminals had "poisoned" search results using a huge number of domains set up to convince search index software that they were credible sources of information.
Windows users who subsequently entered these sites had their machines hijacked and personal information accessed.
Although previous attacks of a similar nature have occurred in the past, this is thought to be by far the biggest operation of its kind.
Commenting on the scheme, Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software - one of the companies responsible for exposing the practice - stated: "This was fairly epic. If your machine was not fully patched you were going to get hosed."
The people who had bought the domains convinced search engines, including Google and Yahoo!, that they were good sources of information by using comment spam on blogs to raise the pages up the search index rankings, he added.
Mr Eckelberry went on to say that Sunbelt had discovered malicious sites connected with an eclectic range of search terms.
"You could be searching for really innocuous things and get nailed," he stated.
Founded in 1994, Sunbelt is a provider of Windows security software, specialising in areas such as antispam and vulnerability assessment.
