Google’s trust of partybuilder feature, it doesn’t take long to notice that under the “Latest Posts” heading, a pair of posts written by “Unknown User,” each with nonsensical letter-sequence titles like “rdthsrthsth” and “vsdgsdfsdgsdg.”
Sure enough, clicking on those titles takes a visitor to keyword link spam leading to presumably nasty places filled with some sort of malware or phishing attempts. The keywords linked are currently popular search terms associated with news events and American Idol contestants and songs, for examples.
Searching for terms like “American Idol March 10” and “Jonas Brothers world tour dates” (keywords targeted on the DNC website) and several others brings back as the second Google search result a website listed as dana.reticular.info and redirects to a Chinese hosted website showing a scareware popup. Scareware is a bogus warning that a computer is infected with a virus. The site offers to scan a user’s computer—where it will certainly find infection—and then offers for a fee to clean it up. Instead it installs a Trojan virus.
“Web 2.0 can be a great thing, empowering users to contribute content for the betterment of the community,” said Craig Schmugar, threat researcher for Avert Labs. “But a bad apple (or thousands) doesn’t just hurt the community -- it can hurt a significant portion of the Web itself.”
A blog on the DNC’s site is set up easily but not automatically. The site requires a valid email address and a confirmation code, which suggests these malicious posts are set up manually. The DNC did not return a request for comment about how closely they monitor blog posts, what type of spam filters are in place, or if they plan to use nofollow links in the future. “Nofollow’ is an HTML command that prevents a link from passing “link juice” capable of influencing a search engine’s trust rank.
A quick look at the Republican National Committee’s website reveals GOP members have access to
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