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Barbara Moratek Leads To Malware
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-01-11
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Criminals have been packing an assortment of sites with malware and other junk, and are using the name "Barbara Moratek" to get those sites indexed by Google and others.
 | | Barbara Moratek Leads To Malware |  |
When one thinks of black hat SEO practices, attempts to game search engines for better rankings and increased traffic come to mind.
The discovery of how spammers are using search optimization to bring people to their malware sites shows how much worse the practice can be for innocent victims. Sunbelt Software looked at how SEO has been used for the name, Barbara Moratek.
Spammers have emailed the usual 419 scam to small non-profit groups, and attached the Moratek name to make it look authentic. Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt described why the spammers did this:
It's likely that malware sites are taking advantage of the fact that people will be googling this name to find out more about it, by stuffing pages with the term "Barbara Moratek" (spamdexing), having purchased or otherwise acquired "zeitgeist" keywords (meaning, loading sites up with current "hot" keywords and then using them to lure people to their site).
At Trend Micro, Paul Ferguson showed how the criminals behind Barbara Moratek made an attempt to get a link to fake video sites onto Digg.
Following the link would be, predictably, dangerous. Ferguson showed the "bouncing malware" path of numerous redirects, all aimed at bringing the victim to a place where they would be prompted to download the Zlob binary, disguised as an ActiveX control.
"I continue to be amazed at the efforts of cyber criminals to social engineer the web, poison web search engines, pollute news & blogging websites, register bogon domains, and obtain hosting in their ongoing efforts to reach their ultimate goal - to separate more & more unsuspecting users from their money," said Ferguson.
We're not amazed, unfortunately.
View All Articles by David Utter
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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