You see them in user communities all over the Internet: spam posts on blogs and boards; fake user profiles or "nicks" (short for "nicknames"); and seemingly inappropriate or misplaced comments and postings on every venue possible — and they all share at least one common goal: to get viewers to click through into their traffic stream and then on to their targeted destinations and beyond…
It's not just you, the individual web surfer that is increasingly being targeted as a source of clicks, however; but Google and other search engines that spider website content, too.
In the ceaseless battle for improved PageRank (PR; a means by which Google orders its search result listings), some promoters have turned to so-called "comment spam" on blog posts and automated message board bots that seek to place keyword-laden back-links on "authority sites" that enjoy — and pass on through these outbound links — a higher PR.
This process can improve the results that the sites being promoted enjoy from their other search engine marketing strategies; and often causes no more annoyance to the victimized website than having an erroneous posting that a moderator or automated tool must delete.
Far more troubling are the more malicious attacks that seek to infect the user's system with malware, as seen in the AARP example; where a coordinated, multi-prong attack that combined automated blog spamming, PR bleeding and automated redirects to porn sites via a JavaScript embedded into profile page listings, added a Trojan drop as well.
"First, hackers found vulnerabilities in AARP.org's user profile functionality, allowing them to post JavaScript redirect code and HREF links to porn sites," Jeremy Yoder of MX Logic, blogged. "Second, hackers employed bots in a massive campaign to submit blog comments containing links to the hacked AARP.org user profiles."
The AARP website is apparently driven by an in-house content management system (CMS) that is lacking in basic security precautions.
"It appears to be a custom system that's missing some baseline-level security capabilities," Yoder opined. "This site is accepting JavaScript code submissions, which are something that most off-the-shelf content management systems would have no trouble blocking."
"There has been a considerable increase in the use of comment and profile spam to promote pornographic or phishing sites in search engines," Yoder added. "This one was particularly notable because of the precise coordination of the attack, the exploitation of Web 2.0 functionality and the SEO motivation."
