We at Bing absolutely believe that security is one of our top priorities. We will keep investing in security, as one of our primary goals is to protect and secure our users and provide them with a safe search experience.

What have we noticed in Bing?

Over the last year, we have seen an increase in social engineering malware. Malware providers mostly target popular search queries on antivirus products, free software downloads, and related technical queries. Their intent is to game the search engine to show their malware sites as top results for the popular queries. This is done by using various search engine spam techniques (page-level and link-level spam techniques). We have also noticed that the number of searches for the queries the malware providers target (for example, antivirus products in various forms) is significant and that they consistently show up in our list of top queries.

Good news for Bing users

In response to this growing threat, Bing has invested in ways to identify and filter sites that download malicious software. We call this feature our Malware Filter. This feature complements our existing Drive-By-Download detection by identifying and removing social engineering malware sites from our results. We can block new threats from existing malicious sites, even if those threats are not yet blocked by traditional antivirus or anti-malware signatures. Here are some examples of what types of sites we are now blocking and how they might infect our users with what they download:

From our analysis on sites blocked by our malware filter, a significant portion of the malware sites are fake antivirus product sites. Bing's Malware Filter is now protecting our users who make queries for those products.

For comprehensive protection from malware, we highly recommend that users also install traditional antivirus products and keep them updated.

How you can help

Please report sites that you think may be malicious using the Bing support form. In the drop down list describing the type of problem, select Other, then complete the rest of the form and click submit.

We’re committed to protecting our users from the attacks of today and those of the future.  Please stay tuned for more blog posts on our security endeavors to protect our users and keep the Internet a safe place to search.

~Sasi Parthasarathy, Bing Index Quality Group