Search Engine Optimization News Blog

The concept of internet fraud and phishing is well known. Often hackers will resort to posing as eBay, a financial institution, or some other subterfuge to get banking information, credit card numbers or social security numbers out of unwary consumers.

With the advent of news feeds, however, a new venue has opened up. Reports of Trojans hidden in CNN news alerts have been making the rounds. Apparently an email stating that your custom CNN alerts have been updated prompts clicking on a link. This activates the malware/spy ware.

If you receive an email alert from what appears to be a legitimate feed, look closely. These are not to be trusted! ALWAYS check links to see where they go before clicking on them. If an email marked CNN proffers a link that doesn’t actually go to CNN, odds are that’s it’s a phishing line.

Google Trends has many news alerts and feeds available, but hackers have figured this out. Blogs are springing up that mimic major news sources, and grab main headlines to encourage downloads of video feed. To access the feed, a codec must be downloaded, which of course carries the Trojan.

The ability of blogs to spring to the top ranks is sadly a unethical use of SEO - these sites are nothing more than scrapers set up to get as many hits as possible by presenting keyword rich text for a temporary ranking before Google catches on.

Google themselves have managed to divert many of these emails to spam folders. MacAfee, however, does not recognize many of the offending sites as security concerns, and neither does Thunderbird, but Firefox catches it and will alert you if you blunder into one.

The ability of these ‘bloggers’ to twist SEO to deliberately infect and install malware and spy ware is highly offensive to the rest of the SEO community, so many are spreading the word. Google can’t catch everything, but humans who take a minute to blog, Twitter or comment on such cases can save others from making a mistake!