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Search Engine Poisoning: One More Thing To Worry About: Page 2 of 2

The Blue Coat report also sheds new light on the prevalence of malware delivery networks (MDNs) and, particularly, the threat they pose to enterprises.
MDNs pose a threat to users when they are linked to from online games, pornography, online gambling and other sites that would likely be blocked on corporate networks, said Clare, but they can also be delivered through sites that could have a legitimate work use such as online storage, software downloads, search engines and others.

Some MDNs are short-lived in that they only exist for a few weeks, such as an MDN that lured users to free pirated copies of one of the popular "Twilight" movie series, a search for "Osama bin Laden death photos" or other popular topics, he said: "It's like there's a freeway and someone just put up a new exit sign and 10 minutes later that exit sign goes away. But what road does that take you down?"

In other cases, while the number of MDNs declined in late May, it was probably because smaller MDNs were acquired by larger ones, combining their talent and resources to launch more attacks, Clare said.

Blue Coat is not the only security company that provides this kind of protection but they are able to leverage their strength in enterprise network optimization to provide this kind of security, said analyst Crawford.

Blue Coat has "a pretty strong footprint" in markets such as network application optimization, client side WAN optimization and app acceleration, he said. "This gives them a rather unique perspective on visibility into that [security] environment."

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