Wow, what a cluster f*. Hundreds of thousands of pages, if not over a million.
Examples (warning: graphic language):
Most of these push videos that push fake codecs.
But it’s not just malware. There’s spam-a-plenty:
And there’s also splogs pushing malware, not as porn, but just off of keywords. Here’s a search for “Symantec Download”:
Click on a link, and you get this page:
That file being pushed, setup.exe, is a trojan.
Or, let’s use the search term “McAfee download”:
(I’m not picking on these AV companies, if you do similar searches for Sunbelt products, you’ll hit these types of things as well.)
These slimeballs are using all kinds of keywords. Here’s some more, like Blackberry Ringtones and Free Messenger Download, returning spam links:
Or how about keeping it simple, and just saying “free download”? Malware!
I’m not making this up. Crank up a virtual machine and try these searches yourself.
Last week, I was quoted as saying that this invasion is due to Google’s CAPTCHA being broken, and this was rebutted by another. I beg to differ: A large part of this is most certainly caused by bots uploading stuff, breaking the CAPTCHA. They may not break it all the time, but they do break it probably 10% of the time. That’s enough to upload a ton of garbage.
This has to, has to stop.
Alex Eckelberry