"This isn't going away, it's too successful of a tactic," said Chenette. "[Attackers] are taking the way that engines are populating their results and using it to their advantage. There's nothing search engines can really do about it unless they redesigned how they create results from the ground up."

As Chenette hinted, this is far from the first time that scareware makers have poisoned search results to shill their worthless software. In February, for example, they used Google's own Trends, a tool that highlights the most popular searches of the past hour, to into clicking on rogue security software downloads.