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Search Engine Optimization Poisoning Way Up In '10
alphadogg writes "Cybercrooks continue to abuse the Web, boosting their ability to produce what's called search engine optimization poisoning so that individuals making use of search engines such as Google's increasingly are ending up with choices that are dangerous malware-laden URL links.
Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday. That's in comparison to 13.7% of Google searches having that outcome in the latter half of 2009, says Patrik Runald, Websense senior manager of security research."
You can find the actual Websense Threat Report in ASP-driven HTML here. I mention ASP because the video doesn't seem to be functioning correctly in my non-IE browser.
... this is the smallest gesture of investigative reporting one could possibly do.
I thought I would find this in the NetworkWorld article. Boy was I mistaken. As I switch between the two pages of the article, I am presented with "Whitepaper" links to reports that then navigate me to a 'page1234' at accelacomm.com where it asks for all my personal information. In the middle of the article (with no indication this has nothing to do with the article) is a link to another NetworkWorld article titled 'Royal pain: British Royal Navy site hacked.' Shouldn't that go in the 'Related Content' section that is also in the article with links to how I can 'bail out my budget'? Oh look, they've hyperlinked phrases in the article that just direct me to another NetworkWorld article and at the end I get directed to their security section. Might they take a chance and link to the source of the information that they are considering an authority on SEO poisoning? So you know, I can judge for myself and further inspect the report? I mean, I'm not asking them to drive across town to get a quote from the mayor
Sorry to rant for so long but it amuses me how a news article about SEO poisoning is obviously taking some questionable routes to up their own stats -- maybe even manipulate Google page ranks? Oh but that's just good old wholesome Search Engine Optimization -- it's those pesky cybercrooks that phish for my home address, not the "esteemed" online news sources we should criticize that ask me to enter it into accelacomm.com when I'm trying to read the news (and I'm not accusing accelacomm of being a scam, just annoyed at the principle).
My work here is dung.
My search engine optimization goes to '11
At least in my case, I've found that google's search results have gotten progressively more useless over the last 2-3 years.
I search for a linux issue I'm having, the only hits I get are ubuntu users in 2004.
I search for applications for my wife's phone, it's almost 100% adware sites, and 0% useful download links.
My google search usage is going down steadily. If I want to know about a company/famous person/whatever, it's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.
Info on movies, actors, etc? imdb.
Looking for directions? Mapquest. Google maps has gotten me lost on countless occasions. (By doing such things as telling me to get off a highway by crossing the meridian, and exiting on the onramp for the opposite direction.)
I don't know whether it's just me, google has thinned out the effort going into their searches in favour of their (many) other endeavours, or if they're just not evolving as fast as the assholes who want to try and monetize my searches for completely unrelated shit.
The annoying thing is when sites that have legitimate and interesting content are ranked nowhere near the spammers.
Many legitimate and useful sites are far and few between. You have to bookmark them because it's doubtful you'll find them again with Google (page 20 or something).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
...but is it really possible to be exploited by clicking on a link? Can someone show some concrete examples of this? I'm not interested in "possible" exploits, but something in the wild that can infect a box running the latest versions of Firefox, AdBlock and NoScript?
I just simply find it all too difficult to believe. If there are really browsers running around out there with security holes as big as Peterbilt trucks, shouldn't they be tagged as "enemies of the state"? Or is all this just so much hype?
I'm seeing the exact same thing. I find that Google is becoming more and more useless for academic research. I would once type in a subject and get tons of legitimate, informative sites written by people who cared about the subjectmatter (remember ThinkQuest? All those fantastic articles are still out there, they just aren't in Google's search results anymore), which I could use as a springboard into deeper research. Now I get Wikipedia as the first result and fifty pages of forums filled with people who have no idea what their talking about. There's still no algorithm for content quality.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
If you abuse Google by deliberately manipulating to get high page results and they knock you out, then why can't Google permanently knock out the same 22.4% of the search result sites that host malware? That would END most users being able to come into contact with the criminally minded in that form of scam.
Almost always when searching for breaking news, the top results are complete spam and malware.
I wonder if Google Instant will soon compound this problem. Once you're apt to see a tidbit of a result and quickly click through, that would be quite the prime target for this type of attack.
Sadly, it's very, very true indeed. I made a (legitimate) site not long ago using Google sites. Submitted the url for review in both bing and google. Bing listed me the next day, without any further input. Google didn't even listed my url in its base (not talking about rank here) until I submitted a sitemap through the webmaster tools, fighting a nasty bug they made in the process but didn't cared to correct since at least a year (if you put your auth key in your DNS zone, the automated sitemap created by google themselves returns a failure in their webmaster tools - brilliant).
Post contents - Trusted download - [CLICK HERE]
Post contents - Full download - [CLICK HERE]
Post contents - Key generator - [CLICK HERE]
Post contents - torrent link - [CLICK HERE]
http://secunia.com/advisories/ and go there and look up your favorite webbrowser or Operating System (or even an app like Adobe Acrobat Reader), & see the lists of security advisories (and especially the UNPATCHED ones). They explain exploits in pretty good detail (could be better though, & more technical imo but I don't think they put up TOO EXACT of information because others can use that for even more crap against others I'd imagine is why), and, how they can be used against you. Sometimes though, there are "work-arounds" recommended even for these known & unpatched security advisories though (some are sort of hokey, e.g.-> "do not open untrusted files" being one example).
One thing you'll probably note though is the sheer amount of exploits that involve javascript exploits over time especially. That's usually the main tool I have seen that is used against users online in say, maliciously scripted webpages or even poisoned ad banners (yes, believe-it-or-not, especially if you haven't heard of that happening before? It happens also, and more than just a few times now for the past 4-5 yrs. in fact).
As to the addons like NoScript or AdBlock? Well, they're programmed themselves and may even bear issues/known security vulnerabilities themselves, so look into that too. That's the 1 problem with complex systems like computer programs of any appreciable relative size: Possible bugs in the way of exploitable code mistakes, and they do happen as well and might be something to also research on your part if you're concerned on this note also.
Now, on the note of maliciously scripted websites? This may help http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm because that is why, in large part, those folks make their custom HOSTS file for: To protect users against known bad sites online.
A good read on much of this is also here, in detail, from Mr. Dancho Danchev (3 yrs. worth of it in fact) as well:
http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/
For the past 3++ yrs. now that security researcher's done a great deal of very in-depth reporting on what you're looking for in fact - sites that are KNOWN to try to "hose your computer".
APK
P.S.=> Enjoy... I think that covers a good deal of ground here for you, per your request... apk
Rather than pay current employees more per hour or per year, maybe Google should have hired more quality raters to help filter the results.
Just yesterday I wanted to download VLC media player. Top link on Bing: repackaged with junk seach engine and crapware newsletters. Top link on Google: the home site which linked to the sourceforge download. Of course Microsoft could be doing that on purpose for Open Source software...
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
The article is not clear what search terms produced 22% malicious URLs. That seems like a high number to me. If you search for "photoshop crack" or "keygen" you're going to get WAY more malware than searching for "fuzzy bunnies".
While I agree that more spam and malware sites have gotten into Google listings, I don't think the problem is quite as dire as the article makes it seem for the typical Google user.
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
I rarely go past the first page of results (which means 10 results in my case). I don't really care about malware that makes it to the first 20-30 results.
clicked a real ad on youtube for a Mario Bros game because my 3 year old was interested. installed it and then Symanted popped up a warning that it was a trojan
There should be a way to search specifically just forums across the net, and/or blogs and not get any other results
I've seen a couple of Slashdot journal writers who try to manipulate SEOs and page hits by getting to get you to click through their media merchandising blogs if you want to see the story they are journaling about. They should be marked as spam, because that is what they are.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
've seen a couple of Slashdot journal writers who try to manipulate SEOs and page hits by getting to get you to click through their media merchandising blogs if you want to see the story they are journaling about. They should be marked as spam, because that is what they are.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Really?
I rarely bother with results beyond the first 20 or so. IF I have to dig deeper, either I munged the search terms, or I'm digging for a specific item I couldn't build a specific search for. Either way, I'm wondering how what percentage of search returns in the first, say, 30, were malware.
And I wonder about the definition of 'malware'. But let's trust that.
How about a small effort, along the way, to clean up the fake links? If I search for a term that even tangentially matches a product, I get search results that invariably include Bizrate and other so-called shopping or pricing sites. And sure enough, Bizrate in particular has an actual product listing about 20% of the time for me. The rest of the time, it did the SEO thing to make it look like it had a listing, when all I get is a 'we don't have any right now, but how about these?' or 'come back later'. Argh. Abuse. Perhaps fraud. I hate them so much I ignore them even if they DO have the product.
Google doesn't care, though. They get paid anyways.
Feh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
should read:
search engine optimization/poisoning
SEO is poison. It's a collection of techniques to poison search results by hacking page ranking algorithms to make irrelevant pages appear relevant. Whether those pages consist of ads or other malware is secondary.
It is too bad that there is no easy way to moderate the links that are returned. Sort of a "Is this relevant to your search" voting system that would, over time, filter out junk results. Unfortunately this probably isn't feasible since bots could just spam the YES button over and over again.
I've found that google's search results have gotten progressively more useless over the last 2-3 years.
So, what's better than Google?
I mean, back in the late 90's, I encouraged everyone to go to Google at the time, because it was so much better than the competition: Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista...they all paled in comparison to the accuracy of Google.
But now, is there anything better than Google? Or is it just like the airlines, where there's no "best option" because everything is terrible.
Article requires JavaScript: Didn't read.
Have gnu, will travel.
They really need to create a ranking system for logged in Google users so people can vote down spammy links. Could be based on the frequency of the reports. Anything in first ten results with more than 100 negative votes per hour, automatically get removed and placed into a holding queue for a Google employee to review. If it's discovered to be spam, automatically penalize the URL in all results and remove it. Hosting companies will never want to host spammers, because all their good customers will go running to the hills. Just a thought..
There is a VERY simple solution to this problem. Refine your search. On the left you can select from which period you want it. I tend to do my linux searches in the last year if they are errors and Ubuntu releases in the last half year/month.
That gives you far better results. Also adding the ubuntu version helps a lot.
But the MAIN problem is that computers still cannot understand human writing, especially chaotic human writing. If every linux article was clearly labelled with a date and a status (fixed for instance) a computer would find it far easier to categorize it.
The Dewey Decimal Classification did for books what Google is trying to do with the internet. But book publishers "behaved" because everyone knew who they were and librarians are not people to be trifled with.
The internet is a Libratarians dream, IE a nightmare for every sane person. Anyone can do what he wants. This doesn't just mean "innocent" people labelleing their content completly wrong but people deliberately trying to game the system. All books published with a title beginning with A. All books falling in every category. TRY to imagin a Dewey Decimal system that could cope with deliberate abuse. Impossible.
A search engine, at least the ones we know now just can't deal with abuse. The old systems relied on meta tags that were treated pretty much the same as "official" category elements. And if you claimed to fall in category X, that is were you were put. Pagerank by Google changed this. It started to check the content and how said content was linked to to determine the category. A hell of a job but it was only a matter of time until this to was going to be abused.
The problem is that we got a missing element. The dewey system consists of three: The system itself, the librarians who control it and the publishers that supply it. Google is the system, the web owners are the publishers but WE, the librarians, are absent. There is no way to feed into google what publishers are not providing the correct data.
Google can't afford to do this themselves, the internet is just to big. Open moderation would be wide open to abuse as well. Remain the link sharing sites. Human run and human controlled sites where people share intresting sites. For me, for certain subjects Wikipedia has becomes the ultimate search site and link site.
Google has to find a way to allow users, trusted users to moderate its search results. If only I could block out e*pert-&xchange (don't want to give them more traffic) my search results would improve a lot. But considering the size of the net, tracking all abuse reports, and abuser reports of abuse reports, would be a staggering amount of work.
But without it, google could loose out. They became big because the previous search companies couldn't clean up their search results. If google can't either, they will end up the same.
That google is looking so hard for other sources of revenue shows that they know this all to well.
YOUR result, your WRONG result is the pagerank at work. It prefers older content, that is presumed to be more reliable over new unchecked content. If google dropped this, then anyone could make a page NOW with a hot bug and fill it with spam. Since pagerank doesn't know that the spam content is not related to the bug/query, it can't remove it. ONLY time (and links) tell Pagerank that content is valid. So pagerank prefers a static web, with old reliable content. Notice how well it indexes wikipedia that is often the first result as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The reason you're going to Wikipedia for actual information is because the site is structured to eliminate anything that isn't factual information. You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls. Soon you'll be hitting podcasts for editorial content instead of the ad-laden multi-click regurgitated PR between top 10 lists that make up most sites.
Twinstiq, game news
I'm thinking google search should:
In the mean time, I could role my own personal service, with a search aggregator bankend. The internet is suffering under the weight of shills and snakes, Grrr.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
They really need to create a ranking system for logged in Google users so people can vote down spammy links.
Won't work. The spammy links come and go too fast. Mean lifetime of a phishing site is a few days. Since most are created automatically, dealing with the problem manually will always be struggling to catch up.
Take a look at our list of major domains being exploited by active phishing scams. That's from PhishTank data, which is updated manually. The list is ordered by how long the site has been on the list. At the top are the usual suspects, with phishing pages up for as long as a year. Towards the bottom, note that seven sites were added this week, and nineteen came off the list in the last week. That level of churn is about normal.
Note that this list is only for "major" sites, ones in Open Directory. Those are legit sites who've been abused by phishers. There are tens of thousands of purposed-built phishing sites on junk domains. Those used to churn really fast in the "domain tasting" days, but with that hole plugged, there's been a little improvement. Now the phishing sites buy hosting with stolen credit card numbers and operate the site until the credit card processing system detects fraud and the hosting service shuts the site down.
I do whitehat SEO work so I have to post AC on this one.
It's not so much that Google has gotten worse it's just that there are many more variables in play right now including that blogs are unfairly weighted for "freshness".
PageRank is one part, but I think the point people are missing is that Google is also using their own Analytics as a "fudge factor" to modify the incoming PageRank of new posts. (Google Trends and Adsense keyword suggestions are your friend here. That and an automated content scraper/rewriter)
If you can get just get on the first page of the search of the day and have Analytics installed to bump you up and up and up... profit!!!
Isn't variable ranking sort of the same as changing menus in XP, to which geeks have complained about to no end?
Basically, the problem is, everyone is seeing a different Google. I sometimes create a link as a Google search instead of a Wikipedia link. But that doesn't really work if everyone has a different ranking.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This just in: Top ranked search on Google today is "fuzzy bunnies". Google has no idea why.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Its been a struggle finding drivers for slightly older equipment as well (I'm talking motherboards from 2006 here). For whatever reason, ASUS doesn't have them available, and when you attempt to Google something, you have no idea what sites to trust. They all appear exactly like spyware-malware breeding zones with your classic "convenient driver update" install programs. I'm not falling for that bullshit. Main problem being is that I'd hate to trust a driver from anywhere other than an item's manufacturer, so I just don't deal with it at all anymore. Really irritates the hell out of me.
...someone or something will develop,that is an improvement to Google,or a new Google-ish, search engine...and then the swing will start. Personally I hope The big G gets back on track with creative ideas vs the political side of things they seem to be getting into more and more these days. But Im just a no buddy.
Joe Investor
If only Google had a means of finding and blocking access to web sites containing malware. A "search engine", if you will.