Nobody likes spam. It’s never fun (unless you’re watching Monty Python). For us it comes with the territory; removing SEO spam has been at the core of what we deal with since our inception, giving us some pretty good insights into the various strategies black hats employ. From time to time however, we find ourselvesRead […]
Tag Archives: Website Spam
SEO Spam Technique Designed to Avoid Detection
Ten years ago the internet looked very different than it does now. Today, web designers have more options and standards to make a website stand out. Do you recall when most sites used clashing colors, font types, and animated gifs? It seems that website spammers haven’t forgotten those days. We often find spam hidden inRead […]
Seo-moz.com SEO Spam Campaign
Here at Sucuri we handle countless cases of SEO spam. This malware involves a website being compromised in order to spread (mostly pharmaceutical) advertisements by linking visitors to unwanted websites and stuffing spam keywords into the site. These links and keywords help the spam websites to rank higher in search engines like Google, sending evenRead […]
Fake Media Download Sites
Your website is a huge part of your brand reputation. It serves as a place to build your audience and helps you get noticed by new visitors from search engines. You spend time working hard to build authority and trustworthiness. When your pages rank high enough, you may find yourself with a whole new setRead […]
Spam Campaign Causes “DDoS” by Googlebot
Every once in a while we get a glimpse into rare and strange behavior that doesn’t involve the website being hacked, but causes major problems for website owners. We have spoken recently about malicious referral spam in Google Analytics and Google Search Console being used by attackers after they gain access to a website. Today,Read […]
Phishing for Anonymous Alligators
Everyone has encountered phishing at some point – fake emails and web pages designed to look legitimate. This tactic is becoming more popular as attackers are learning how to produce new and convincing phishing lures. You might receive spam emails claiming to have some important document for you. Some of them have malicious attachments andRead […]
Analyzing Proxy Based Spam Networks
We are no strangers to Blackhat SEO techniques, we’ve actually spent a great deal of time working and sharing various bits of information related to Blackhat SEO techniques over the years. What we haven’t shared, however, is the idea of Proxy-based Spam Networks (PSN). It’s not because it wasn’t interesting, it’s just not something we’d seenRead […]
Malicious Google Search Console Verifications
This past summer we noticed a trend of more and more Blackhat SEO hacks trying to verify additional accounts as owners of compromised sites in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). Google Search Console provides really useful information and tools to webmasters who want to: Know how their websites perform in search results. Receive notification about performance, configuration and securityRead […]
Wigo Means Bingo for Blackseo Agent
This week my colleague Peter Gramantik showed me a few infected sites that had very similar code embedded in the WordPress index.php files: if (eregi(‘-dbst’,$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])) { error_reporting(0); include (‘license.txt’); exit(); } The code is very simple. It checks if a page URL has “-dbst” appended to the URL and executes code from an included file. AtRead […]
Malicious Google Analytics Referral Spam
Robots (bots) have outnumbered people on the Internet for almost two years, and they browse much faster than your average visitor. Aside from spamming your comment systems and crawling for vulnerable websites to attack, bots can also cause a lot of confusion in your website traffic reporting systems. If you use analytics software on yourRead […]
