As more people, particularly readers of this website/blog become aware of the dangers of phishing, where you get an email purportedly from a legitimate organization that sends you by link to a phony website all the while downloading malware on your computer when you click on the link, scammers are adapting their tactics to now using internet search engines, such as Google and Bing to lure people into clicking on links that people think will be sending them to a legitimate website, but instead downloads dangerous malware onto your computer that can steal all of the information from your computer and make you a victim of identity theft.  Scammers have been able to infiltrate search engines by adapting their phony websites to the algorithms used by the search engines to make their phony websites that contain the dangerous links receive more traffic.  People are less aware of this danger and are less skeptical of search engine results than they are of emails with phony phishing links.

TIPS

Many of the tainted websites are tied to celebrity news or major world news events.  If you are searching for such information, limit your searches to websites that you know are legitimate.  Since many of these search engine phishing scams are based in Russia and China, you should be particularly aware of websites with links that end in .ru (Russia) or .cn(China).  Both Google and Microsoft are acting to try to combat this type of scam, but it is a difficult task and you should not expect a solution soon.