Via Help Net Security, Barracuda’s recently released its Barracuda Labs 2010 Midyear Security Report which includes the results of a study it did on search engine and Twitter malware. It focused on 25,000 trending topics over a two month period. The somewhat surprising finding was that percentage of malware laden links on Google (69%) exceeded Yahoo! (18%), Bing (12%), and Twitter (1%) combined. The “Searching for Malware, A Comparative Study,” starts on page 56 of the report.

It would have been interesting if the study broke down the results by page. In other words, the percentage of malware found on the first page of the search results, etc. Most people only review the first few pages of a search result.

This provides additional proof of the need of a web-based anti-malware solution. You surely cannot depend on the search engines themselves to do the job.

Full disclosure. Cymbel does partner with Barracuda, but for Web Application Firewalls. For web-based anti-malware, we recommend Zscaler.