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Google Wave Targeted by Malicious SEO
Google’s highly anticipated online social centre, Google Wave went live yesterday for a select few users, but was marred by the malicious efforts of cyber criminals using frowned upon “black hat” Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques.
Google Wave was made available for 100,000 users who were granted invitational preview access to the system. According to Google’s dedicated site: “Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.”
What Google Wave does is allow people to communicate in a live messaging service which incorporates rich content of text, Facebook photos, videos, tweets, PowerPoint slides whatever they desire. Wave content can be replied to or edited by any person in the conversation and a playback feature allows new participants to rewind a wave and see how the conversation developed.
Cyber criminals online seized upon the hype of Google’s newest product range to gain access to computers and personal information of internet users. Google Wave has certainly been a hot topic this week, with one Google Wave invitation on auction at eBay for over $5,000 before the company intervened.
Using spamming SEO techniques, the online hackers promoted websites about Google Wave which then received a high Google ranking and received clicks from users legitimately interested in the new tool. The sites misdirected users to download Trojan viruses and other malicious software.
False sites masquerading as useful and informative portals have mainly targeted Google Wave this week, by Microsoft’s free security software and Apple’s iPhone have also been the subject of black hat SEO this week to catch the unwary.
Google News posted by Scott Tickner on 01 October 2009
