Category Archives: PR

Google PR ‘comment spam on blogs’ attack thwarted !

Posted on by
Reply

Attack Of The Fake Search Results

A massive attempt to defraud search users was thwarted yesterday, according to the BBC. Hackers created thousands of booby-trapped Web sites that tricked Google, MSN and Yahoo search crawlers into ranking them very high. The hackers used comment spam on blogs to achieve the high results. The Web sites would come up in search results for terms like “Christmas gifts” and “hospice,” the report said. Users who clicked on these fake sites risked having their computers hijacked and their personal information stolen.

However, the attack was uncovered yesterday. “This was fairly epic,” said Alex Eckelberry, who heads Sunbelt Software, one of the firms that uncovered the attack. Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains were used in the attack and that most were Chinese registered and hosted in the U.S. He said the attack could be a harbinger of many more to come.

As usual, the malicious software exploited weaknesses in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. “If your machine was not fully patched, you were going to get hosed,” Eckelberry said. He added that the fake Web sites were only programmed to show on Google.com, even though Yahoo and MSN’s crawlers also indexed them. From MediaPost Link to BBC

Enjoying the Twitter Experience

Posted on by
Reply

I have been having a good time using Twitter lately. Lots of cool people, throwing out info about the daily minutiae of their lives. Being online all the time during the work week and beyond, it is nice to have a little SMS type broadcast device for the Wild West that is the Web.

I was remarking to someone today how Twitter is like having your own personal live PR feed to the internet, cause in Twitter your can broadcast relevant links, combined with Tiny URL, it makes for a powerful tool.

After I first started using Twitter, I was re-doing my ancient photography site, and I put into Google my name. EGADS ! I saw all my Twitter thingys all over the first page of Google. I quickly changed my real name in my settings, and re-thought how silly I was going to allow myself to go.

I am hoping the spammer types are not going to get a hold of this information, cause it could bring down the whole Twitter network, or whatever it is.

It id pretty awesome, even though Twitter is not a syndicated PR feed, the fact that it can be used to broadcast relevant links, coupled with the way Google currently appears to index Twitters ‘broadcast’ brings up some interesting ideas.