A malware network has been discovered siphoning profits from Google, Yahoo, and Bing by spoofing the search engines and their DNS addresses.

Dubbed the “Bahama Botnet,” it hijacks search engine results with doctored links that run a user through a chain of sponsored ad sites. After clicking his or her way through the ads, the user eventually ends up on the requested page.

A traceroute of the connection shows that although the DNS name of the server appears to be legitimate, users are actually connected to 64.86.17.56, an unknown IP address in Canada.

It will be interesting to see how the major search engine corporations respond to this threat.