Search Engine Wars: Protect Yourself From Malicious Websites

While most search engines are pretty good at weeding out malicious sites and not displaying them, some are better than others. According to AV-Test, a German independent testing lab, the top search engines, Bing and Google, are miles apart in terms of secure searching.

It’s not possible for search engines to catch all malicious sites that appear in the search results. More and more appear every day, regardless of the measures taken to prevent them from popping up. The test was applied to Google, Bing, Yandex (a Russian search engine), Blekko, Faroo, Teoma (aka Ask.com), and Baidu (a Chinese search engine).

Out of the 40 million websites examined, the results were fairly miniscule; about 5000 malicious websites were detected, around 0.000125 percent of those tested. However, even among the top two contenders, there was a huge gap in results. In the end, Bing’s search results contained 1285 malicious sites, a far cry from Google’s impressive 272.

Should you be worried about these numbers? A good answer would be, “You can never be too careful,” but your chances of running into a trojan or other nasty things on a search engine are fairly low. However, you really can’t take any risks with anything in business. Everything you’ve worked so hard for could be at risk. To make matters worse, there’s a chance that malware developers have used search engine optimization to sneak their malicious websites into the top search results, which could cause you to make a mistake and think that it’s a safe website.

The solution? Contact XFER. We can use our managed IT services to provide you with all of the remote monitoring services you could possibly need, and we can use our enterprise-level Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution to keep outside threats where they belong; outside your system. This includes firewall protection, antivirus, and web filtering. This is a perfect way to stack online protection in addition to what search engines already offer in their search results.

You’ll have nothing to fear, and even if something does get through the filtering process, you’ll be the first to know. We’ll fix the problem and get it taken care of as soon as possible with minimal downtime for you and your business.

Thinking about taking the next step toward a more secure web experience? Look no further than XFER. We’ll make sure that your web browsing is as safe as can be. All you need to do is call 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER.