Security Advisor
Take the Bing Challenge and Get 5 Times the Malware
According to testing company AV-Test, Bing's search results turn up five times more sites hosting malware compared to Google results.
The study was performed over an 18-month period and monitored how many harmful search results a list of the top-used search engines came up with. In 10.9 million search queries, Google turned up 272 infected sites, while Bing brought back 1,285 results fronting malware.
"Google achieved the best results in the study, followed by Bing," read the report. "Attention must, however, be drawn to the fact that Bing delivered five times as many websites containing malware as Google during the study. The Russian search engine Yandex even delivered 10 times as many infected websites in comparison with Google."
AV-Test's report also found that the amount of existing malware continues to grow. As of last month, the testing firm found that there was as many as 110 million pieces of malware in the wild. Compare this with April 2012's number of around 75 million pieces of malware and you see that hackers are continuing to focus on Web-based attacks.
So, of course, the game plan should continue to be to keep all your software up to date, and make sure your front line has a strong antivirus software, according to AV-Tests. Also, not clicking on sketchy sites may also help.
Do you use Bing? And if you do, have you noticed a higher amount of suspicious sites pop up in your results? Share your thoughts in the comments below.