Printable or not printable?

These last days we're seeing lots of malicious Google search results. In the industry, this is called SEO-poisoned attacks.

For example, my friend Patricia asked me last week about a "very strange" result she got when she googled for "vans rental cork ireland". This is what she got:

 

Digging a bit more into it, I found that the original site had been hacked and replaced by an online pharmacy ad site. The page that replaced the original van rental content also had links to other compromised pages. When Google sees that a highly-positioned page has links to other potentially-interesting sites, it also ranks those sites very highly. This in turns boosts each of them to make them appear very high in their respective search results. Even a week after it was cleanup up, Google still had a copy of the pharmacy page in their cache (that's how I found out all this stuff)

There were some 20+ other hacked pages involved, all ranking quite high in Google. These Google-ranking technique is known as "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO for short.

But this doesn't end there. Either the same group or some other with the ability to compromise a large amount of web sites, started earlier this week to set up redirection pages to legitimate sites. These real websites had a page hidden somewhere within their structure that, when accessed, would point you to a fake antivirus site to scam you. You might be thinking "What is the point of having a hidden web page in a legitimate domain if nobody will be able to find it?". That where their SEO techniques come into play. As in the pharmacy ad case, they riddled the pages with hints and tricks for Google to rank them up quickly and appear high when searching for certain terms. This is a quick list of term that, as of today, still yield malicious results:

road bingo printable cards
rounding how to printables
scary printable pumpkin patterns
shapes sorting printable pocket chart
sleepover party printable invitations
small group bible lessons printable
smith corona na3hh printable instruction manual
spelling word study guides printable
spending track worksheet printable
spirit halloween printable coupons

Now that the attack has lost steam, the bad results start appearing in the lower half of the first result page. I'm guessing there might be many many more search terms but this is just what I found in a quick investigation.

The bottom line of this attack for the average internet user is : Do not trust google results all the time. I know this is a bit shocking but with the amount of bad people out there trying to scam and take advantage of good people, I'm just not surprised very often anymore.

Be careful out there...