We're not in Kansas anymore

I use the internet a lot for work - probably 50% of my time everyday is spent online doing research. A lot of that research is via search engines, following links - looking things up. Perhaps I was being a little naive - but I thought as long as I didn't go to any websites that weren't safe for work, my computer would be ok.

Then I read this

Update: Subverted search sites lead to massive malware attack in progress
Trojans, rootkits, password stealers hit users who click on a bad link after a search

November 27, 2007 (Computerworld) -- A large-scale, coordinated campaign to steer users toward malware- spewing Web sites from Google and other Internet search engines is under way, security researchers said Tuesday.

Users searching Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search and other engines with any of hundreds of legitimate phrases -- from the technical "how to cisco router vpn dial in" to the heart-tugging "how to teach a dog to play fetch" -- will see links near the top of the results listings that lead directly to malicious sites hosting a mountain of malware.

"This is huge," said Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software's CEO. "So far we've found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages. That's 40,000 possible pages."
Those pages have had their search site ranking boosted by crooked tactics that include "comment spam" and "blog spam," where bots inundate the comment areas of sites with links or mass large numbers of them as bogus blog posts. Attackers may be using bots to plug links into any Web form that requests a URL, added Sunbelt malware researcher Adam Thomas.

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