This year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been chock full of upsets, but none may have been bigger than the ousting of number one overall seed Kansas, as the Jayhawks fell to No. 9 seed University of Northern Iowa 69–67 this past Saturday. While the game, and the tourney in general, have provided much drama this year, security vendor eSoft warns that web surfers seeking more information on the upset and the University of Northern Iowa basketball program may be in for a bit of a surprise, as some of the top search results are returning links to malware-infected websites.
"This ‘Cinderella’ story has deservedly gotten a great deal of press coverage”, said eSoft CTO Patrick Walsh in a recent Infosecurity blog posting about the Northern Iowa upset. “However, those looking for information on the web may get infected with malware rather than a great story.”
eSoft’s Threat Prevention Team was able to pinpoint 7 of the top 10 Google search results for “UNI Basketball” as links to sites infected with malware, including the second overall result listed in the search. More troubling was the relative infectiveness of major virus prevention filters in detecting the malicious links. According to Virustotal, which tracks the detection capability of antivirus engines, only 14.29% of antivirus services identified the links as being infected by malware, prompting eSoft to categorize the current likelihood of detection as “very low” at best.