Free Web 2.0 Sites Used to Push Porn
Online porn can be a money maker if you can get the traffic to sites and it looks like some are turning to Google Groups to help drive customers. InformationWeek is reporting that porn spammers compromised Google's services possibly bypassing the Captcha challenges.
Over the weekend, pornographic images and videos began appearing on Google Groups pages, along with infectious malware."These pages push other porn pages for profit," said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of security company Sunbelt Software, in a blog post. "While not all of the redirects go to malware sites, we did observe some redirects to a site which ultimately pushes a fake codec trojan, which if installed, results in a VirusHeat infection.
Google has taken down the problematic sites but questions remain about the effectiveness of the captcha tests for blocking automatic registrations in Google Groups. Spammers don't need a high accuracy rate on the captcha tests anymore than they need a high response rate on spam. If they can get through 1 in 10 or even 1 in 100 times the resulting profit can make the effort worth it. This raises the bar on the effectiveness of tests to verify a human is actually filling out online registration forms.
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