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Cyber crooks swoop in on Google Video

Online search engine tools are quickly gaining popularity among cyber crooks who are using them to expose users to online threats by redirecting their queries to malicious websites, it has emerged.

The latest to be targeted is Google Video, whose results have been doctored to send people to dodgy sites set up by the crooks when certain queries are keyed in, warns online security firm Trend Micro.

"Instead of legitimate videos researchers found some 400,000 queries returning video results that have a single redirection point, and one that eventually leads to malware download and execution," said the firm.

According to the internet security firm, the malicious executable, "spreads via removable and network drives when autorun is enabled", and masquerades as an Adobe Flash installer.

Yahoo!' was also recently targeted by a similar exploit, which took advantage of "open redirection functionalities" to redirected internet users to replica websites that were illegitimate.

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