Haiti Donation Appeal & Abused Search Engine Keywords

NEWS: Haiti Donation Appeal & Abused Search Engine Keywords

Published: January 19, 2010, 12:00 am
Updated: January 19, 2010, 9:41 am
Lead Author: Cliff Lyon
Topics: Donation Frauds
Content Source: Methusela Cebrian Ferrer

Haiti Donation Appeal & Abused Search Engine Keywords

Published: January 17 2010, 11:32 PM
by Methusela Cebrian Ferrer

The Haiti earthquake's devastating effect continues to rise and emotional stories emerge from this catastrophic event, in which scammers and online threats are lurking to take advatage of the situation.

The FBI published a fraud alert, reminding Internet users to perform due diligence before responding to donation appeal requests, just like this email content as shown below:

Good morning,

My name is John Slameu from Port au Prince city in Haiti. We had been distabilised by a very worse eathquake that I'd ever experinced in my lifehood,but i thanked God that I'm safely alive with my 3 kids while my wife is still in the hospital receiving treatment on her wounds and injuries.

We are homeless,jobless and hopeless. Though several organisation's, countries and personalities had been trying their best about our aid but i need some personal help and assistance to relocated to a very far place of the town and feeding my children's.

Kindly help me out with any amount you can afford to help us with and God will be with you in all your eadeavour's.

Get back to me as soon as possible.

Thanks.

John.

 

In our previous blog post titled

Latest Blackhat SEO on Haiti Earthquake

, we discussed how a simple Google search could lead the  user’s browser to rogue security software.

 

Despite various alerts and security advisories, Blackhat SEOs continuously take advantage of Haiti Earthquake search trends.  Here’s  an example below of Blackhat SEO seeding used to lure potential victims:

 

1.     Text Haiti Relief

 

2.     Haiti Nursing jobs

 

3.     Haiti Relief Red Cross

 

4.     Nurses Needed In Haiti

 

5.     Facebook Haiti Donation

 

6.     Hotel Montana Haiti Rescue

 

7.     International Red Cross Haiti

 

8.     American Airlines Haiti Relief

 

9.     BBC News Haiti earthquake appeal

 

10.   American Red Cross Haiti Donation Text

 

Online contents (

e.g.

news update, blogs, images, video) are constantly created and updated, this allows automated SEO bots to keep harvesting keywords from tags, titles, highlighted sentences and phrases, and utilize these to improve internal linking structures. As a result, it creates a crawlable website that continously seeks to increase its page .

[ Figure 01 – This content is based from an active compromised website hosting Blackhat SEOs. It clearly displays how it manipulates phrase keywords to enable or push its desired content.]

 

As observed, malicious affiliate websites contains the following strings in the URL:

 

•    /?q=

 

•    in.php?q=

 

•    my.php?q=

 

•    .php?<keyword>=

 

It hijacks and/or redirect your browser to Rogue Security Software or perform Drive-by known exploits such as in Adobe PDF to serve malware. 

 

We advise Internet users to remain cautious and keep their security software signature updated!

The Author

Cliff LyonI am. ... (Full Bio)

Comments

There are no comments.

Add Comment



You must be logged in to post a comment. Click here to login.