"Up to the top six results for search phrases about iPhone and SMS are poisoned," said Stephan Chenette, the manager of security research at Websense. "This obviously has to do with the iPhone's new MMS feature," he added, referring to the launch last Friday by AT&T of its Multimedia Message Service for the popular iPhone.

"The hosts involved were registered just three or four days ago," Chenette said.

Late Friday morning, Pacific time, , one of the most long-awaited features for the iPhone.

When users click on one of the poisoned search results, they're redirected to a malicious site promoting "scareware," the term used to describe phony security software that claims a PC is heavily infected. The software duns users with bogus pop-up warnings until they fork over up to $50 for the useless program.

It's all too easy for cyber criminals to poison search results with links to malware or other malicious content, said Chenette. "They have millions of bots at their fingertips," he said, "and with that control, they can sway the results of any search engine at any time."