Search Marketing News

SEO poisoning campaign affects 260,000 websites

November 19th 2009

A search engine optimisation (SEO) poisoning campaign has apparently affected more than 260,000 websites.

The scam has targeted Google search by getting browsers that are linked to sites to attempt to download malware on to their machines, according to internet security platform Cyveillance.

The official Cyveillance blog reported that the common string albums/bsblog/category has been posted in many URLs of several blogs, inputting several results leading to malicious sites.

If readers copy and paste the destination URL into their browser to direct it to the desired website, they would be taken to a harmless blog posting, the blog states.

However, the attack occurs when the compromised blog site determines that users arrived by way of Google by checking the HTTP referrer.

Cyveillance said that the infected sites utilised rogue blog publishing to automatically generate new posts with titles like "Las Vegas rental no credit check" or "uninvited song lyrics Alanis Morrissette" and were detrimental to legitimate SEO(search engine optimisation) operations.

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