An outage of the Windows Live ID service affected a large number of MSN users today, including users of the popular Hotmail email service. Hotmail is one of the largest web-based email outlets and not surprisingly news of the outage spread quickly as users were not able to access their email.
Those hoping to find more information on Google may have ended up with more than they bargained for. Blackhats have once again worked their magic to infect users looking for news related to the outage. In fact, 8 out of the top 10 results for “hotmail service unavailable” returned dangerous URLs.
At the time of writing Google Trends shows this as one of the top searches of the day. Other dangerous searches include “hotmail down” and “hotmail not working” both of which also returned malicious URLs that can cause a visitor’s computer to become infected with malware.
As an added twist, some results direct users that revisit the same page to a fake download site. The user is asked to download hotmail_down.rar, but not before entering their credit card information.
eSoft has detection for many of these sites and is flagging any new sites into their appropriate security category to protect SiteFilter users.