Beware of Google links says Symantec researcher

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 06 November 2007 10:39

Business IT - Security

Spammers have found a way of forming Google search queries that link directly to their sites, according to Symantec's security response team.

The trick is to take advantage of the inurl and intext search operators so that the search only finds the page being spammed, and then adding a parameter that simulates the user clicking on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Google's inurl operator restricts the results to URLs that contain the following string, while intext does a similar job on the pages' contents.

Links in any email should always be treated with caution, but the growing use of URL classification and filtering services may be making some people careless.

"As usual, spammers keep changing their techniques to defeat the filters, but on the other hand, we develop new techniques and technology to counter them," said Symantec's Jitender Sarda.