Posted by Virus Bulletin on Mar 22, 2007
Blogs, social sites and search results rivaling email for junk ads.
Email, long the most popular and lucrative means of getting advertising in front of computer users, is being challenged by other online techniques, as 'Web 2.0' and complex click-through advertising systems leave the Internet open to a deluge of online advertising.
Links on popular social sites such as MySpace and trackbacks on blog postings have become popular spots to inject catchy slogans and often misleading phrasing aiming to draw traffic to sites pushing unlicensed pharmaceuticals, suspicious financial services and pornography. MySpace has been targeted in the past by malware pushing advertising as well as spoofed shopping sites, and like other social sites continues to be riddled with link spam.
Blog trackbacks, allowing links to peddling sites to be automatically inserted into postings, have allowed spammers to bombard blogs and forums with their wares, including, as some analysis from Sophos shows, one Filipino news site which found it was hosting over 27,000 links to adult and financial sites.
Search results have also been manipulated to lead unwitting victims to both malware and advertising. Some major new research, carried out jointly by researchers from Microsoft and the University of California, investigates the complex webs of links funneling advertising money from genuine sites and marketing syndication services into the hands of search and link spammers. Some analysis of the results is here, while the full paper can be found (in PDF format) here.
Posted on 22 March 2007 by Virus Bulletin
