The study – which was carried out by Barracuda's research operation, Barracuda Labs, and analysed the IP traffic across the firm's many customers – found that 1 in 5 search engine topics generated malware links. In parallel with this, the report shows that 1 in 1,000 search engine results lead to malware.
Based on measurements taken in June and December of last year, Barracuda says that the amount of malware found daily increased 55% between these two months.
Malware, meanwhile, was more evenly distributed across the different search engines at the end of the year.
In June, Google was crowned 'king' of malware, generating 69%. By December, that number decreased by 45% with Google containing 38% of the overall malware.
"This shows that attackers have not only increased the amount of overall search engine malware but also have decided that it is worth targeting other search engines besides Google", notes the report.
Delving into the study reveals that, in general, illicit activity continues to increase on Twitter, as more users are coming online and tweeting more often. Even casual users are becoming more active, says Barracuda, which means that, as users become more active, the malicious activity also increases
For every 100 Twitter users, the study found that 39 have between one and nine followers, while 50% of Twitter users have more than 10 followers. 79% of users, meanwhile, tweet less than once per day
Commenting on the report's findings, Dr Paul Judge, Barracuda's chief research officer, said that attackers are focusing on where they can get the most eyeballs and profit, and today that means social networks and search engines.
"As a community we often point to the need for user education as the missing component; however, the levels of social engineering involved in today's attacks suggest that we must continue to elevate our technological approaches", he said.
"The research community must continue to build innovative defences and the industry must make efforts to increase the deployment rates of those defences", he added.