SEO these days is not just a catalyst for the white hats but also for the ones that don the Black Hat, in other words the people who make their earnings through cyber crimes and the like. The latter it seems are getting better by the hour at cheating their way through online businesses.

SEO is predominantly about stimulating traffic to your website through better Search Engine rankings. Cyber criminals have obviously caught on to the works of this mechanism and tailored their cheating ways to make the most of their Malware-ridden probes.

A typical BlackHat SEO scenario would be where users are tricked into clicking on links that are dusted with misleading SEO keywords. These links send users to websites that lure them into downloading fake anti-virus softwares that infest your PC with malicious viruses or extract your personal data. This data is exchanged with illegal sources, hackers, etc. According to the Websense 2010 Threat Report the latest to join the BlackHat Bandwagon is a combination of phony anti-malware software and viruses like the Zeus. The increase in SEO exploitation is such that more than 20% of the Top 100 search results on Google’s search engine are recorded as malware threats. Their tactic is to employ the use of those elements that are either in public demand or arouse the curiosity of the same. Tracing back to the initial few months of ’10, one of every 5 searches related to the Haiti earthquake and the World Cup football was intoxicated with malware.

Facebook and other social media networks have also been smartly targeted by the BlackHat SEO experts. For instance the notorious bognets like the KoobFace spam status and activity updates on social networks.

A solution to this issue is yet to be coined, however if internet security experts could determine a way to track domains, IP’s, etc, then there’d be some hope to unmasking the faces behind these evils.