Andrew LaVallee

Looking for a Google Wave invitation? Be careful what you search for.

Google has sent some 100,000 preview invites to the new messaging and collaboration tool, and the tech-savvy or merely curious are angling for one of their own. But cybercriminals have taken notice and published several fraudulent sites that appear in search results for queries like “google wave invitation” and “google wave download,” said security firm Websense.

These criminals are posting blog entries and Web pages that contain those phrases to lure consumers, said Stephan Chenette, manager of security research at Websense Labs, then attempting to trick them into downloading and installing fake antivirus software that is actually malware.

Because the attackers are in control of so many blogs and pages, they can link them to each other, which helps them make them more prominent in Web searches. “They basically can associate these terms with a URL that they control and thus poison the brain of the search engine,” Mr. Chenette said.

Spotted here