Fighting malware and spam

Google Groups and Blogspot used to serve malware

Company finds own IP address to be serving most malware.

Malware writers have created thousands of Google Groups with the sole purpose of serving malware, Sunbelt reports.

On the Groups pages, visitors are shown several images with explicit pornography, as well as what looks like an embedded YouTube video. However, when clicking on the display to start the video, the visitor is served a fake codec - a trojan that masquerades as a codec needed to play the video. Links to these groups are known to have been sent out in spam and have been posted on various discussion forums.

At the same time, the infamous 'Storm' botnet is sending out spam containing links to various blogs on Google's blogging system Blogspot. Not unsurprisingly, the malware authors do not want to tell users about their online diaries, but instead spread their worm even further: the blogs, which have been specially created for these purposes, take the user to a page where they are led to believe that they will download a nice animation. Of course, the download turns out to be a new version of the Storm worm. More can be found at F-Secure here.

While Google is known to work hard to remove all malicious pages from its system, users are warned to be wary when clicking on links, both in email and on the web. The fact that a link directs to a trusted domain does not necessarily mean the content is not malicious.

That the company has quite a bit of work to do cleaning its pages can be seen in figures on StopBadware.org that were provided by Google itself. The figures show that the number one IP address serving the most malware in March is one of the company's own.

7 April 2008

Tags: blogspot, google, stopbadware.org, storm, trojan, worm.   

1 comment

We posted a clarification on the StopBadware blog explaining how there are so many Google sites in our list of sites Google itself has flagged. Short answer: Google finds & cleans up the sites faster than their cleanup is reflected in the data they send to us. More at http://blogs.stopbadware.org/articles/2008/04/07/commentary-on-top-infection-stats

Erica

StopBadware staff

by Erica George, 08 April 2008, 20:00

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