12/28/09
Bogus Pharmacy sites finding new ways around spam and search engine filters
For years, email inboxes – and hopefully spam folders – have been barraged by offers for performance enhancing drugs, Viagra alternatives and other offers from bogus pharmacy sites. As spam filters began to catch more of these ads, fraudulent pharmacy sites increasingly utilized tactics such as posting links on blog comment pages, to increase their placement on Google. Now, these cybercriminals have taken the next step in search engine manipulation by setting up shop at Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces blog hosting environment, eSoft reported. By creating accounts on Live Spaces that they use only to promote links to the fraudulent pharmacy sites the search engine ranking for them is sent to the first page, increasing the chances of searchers clicking through to them. Additionally, while spam links in emails had been sent to the pharma-fraud previously – often resulting in spam filtering software catching it – it is now evading the filters by sending links to these fake blogs instead Both Yahoo and Google-owned Blogger have also reported similar activity, according to eSoft.
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