Is Google under attack?

Posted by Angel

There is some serious speculation going on at the moment that Google’s Toolbar PR update may have been delayed due to the recent spate of inane Chinese sites that appear to have been created to facilitate some sort of attack on Google. This is one for all your conspiracy theorists on the Internet.

The truth is out there

In July, Symantec reported that there was a surge in spam messages originating from Chinese domains (.cn). Spammers turned to Chinese domains because they were yet to appear on anti-spam blacklists, according to ZDNet Asia.

Now, .cn domains are appearing frequently in pages of search results on Google. The more specific the search terms, the more like .cn domains will appear, wrote John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine.

These Chinese domains have somehow made it to the top of Google search results pages. Dvorak speculates that Google is being directly attacked.

Nobody knows who is doing this or why. The domains are not parked domains, so it’s not a ploy to get money – it runs far deeper than that. Someone has tapped into the Google index and got away with it.

Chinese drama

The .cn domains typically host scraped content from other websites, but they rank above the sites they are scraping from, as Google Watchdog reports. Clicking on one of the .cn sites redirects the user to a site that attempts to install malware.

Google Watchdog had this:

It appears that the faked sites are redirecting the Googlebot to a location where content can be indexed, while at the same time recognizing normal users and redirecting them to a site that includes the malware mentioned earlier.

Scary, right? There are millions of these sites, so don’t click on them if they show up in any search engine. Noticed .cn site showing up in your list of spam comments caught by Akismet?

Any thoughts on this?

While you’re here, why don’t you Digg this? Who knows what might happen.