The Dark Visitor

Just finished reading an article at News.cn on the growing number of phishing sites and trojans related to train ticket sales in China.  Train ticket sales soar just before the start of the Chinese New Year, as people use the week-long holiday to visit family and friends.

According to the report, the hackers are setting up sites based on keyword searches and then using search engine optimization techniques to push those websites to the top of the search engine results.  They are also finding the most popular websites associated with train ticket sales and looking for cracks to install trojans.

So, if you were a Chinese hacker, how would you find the hottest trends?  What are people in China searching for at this moment?  What are the most lucrative targets to generate the highest number of compromises?

Top Baidu – Lists all of the most popular Chinese searches in numerous categories (auto xlation version).

Google Insight – You can get a list of the top searches and rising searches covering the last seven days in China.

Google Trends China – Check the popularity of a search term over time such as train ticket.