Posted by Erica George
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:32:00 GMT
The Bits blog at the New York Times yesterday highlighted a disturbing twist to a common spammer practice. Search engine spam, or spamdexing, involves spammers gaming search engine results by creating pages that pretend to have useful content, often based on current news items. Instead of new content these pages have links and text scraped from other sites, and are loaded with ads or badware.
The shameless twist observed by the Times is the exploitation of recent obituaries as news items, leading grieving friends and relatives to spam and badware sites instead of information about their departed loved ones. In the case profiled by the Globe, a website offered what it claimed was a video of the memorial service for a recently deceased woman. When a visitor clicked the link, he was prompted to download a video codec that included badware.
For friends and relatives who are dismayed to see their loved ones’ memories tarnished by search results full of spam and badware, there are some ways to fight back. Most major search engines offer a place to report search spam – here are reporting links for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Google also offers a way to report pages with badware that are found in its index, here.
Posted in all | Tags action, badware, search, spam
Posted by Erica George
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:33:00 GMT
In the last few days, there has apparently been a surge of badware-distributing web sites that trick search engines into thinking they’re legitimate. Researchers at Sunbelt Software first reported the gaming of Google results a few days ago, with articles following from the BBC, ComputerWorld, and others. Google* has reportedly removed the offending sites from its results, saying violations of its quality guidelines can lead to removal from its index. The gaming attacks have also affected other major search engines, though reports indicate the exploits on the malicious websites were coded to target only Google searchers.
The attacks were carried out on massive numbers of newly registered domains, apparently primarily hosted in the US but registered in China. Be suspicious of highly ranked search results that appear to be from a US-based site, but that link to a .cn (Chinese) or other national domain in the website’s address, and of websites whose addresses are entirely strings of random characters without any words or names. As always, an important part of protecting yourself online is keeping your software – including browsers, anti-virus and anti-spyware applications – up to date. If you suspect your computer may have been infected, check out our tips for badware removal.
* Note: Google is a StopBadware sponsor and partner.
Posted in all | Tags badware, Google, hacking, search
