Bing and images searches dominate malware search listings: Sophos

Microsoft’s Bing search engine generates more search results for websites compromised with malware than Google, according to a new report by cyber security firm Sophos.

The report examines cases where a Sophos user attempted to visit a website known to contain malware as the result of a web search.

Despite Google’s dominance of the search engine market, the report finds that in 65% of cases, users were using Microsoft’s Bing search engine, with Google accounting for 30% of cases, and other search engines (including Baidu, AOL and Ask) accounting for the remaining 5%.

More alarmingly, 92% of attempted attacks came as the result of a user searching for an image, with search results for traditional search engines making up just 8% of all attempted attacks.