Google Warns Web Owners & Operators against Social Profile Spam

Google have drawn attention of web developers and owners towards a new online threat 'social profile spam' in which spammers create fake social profiles on various websites. Some social networks have to cope with this rising menace of bogus social profiles, fake accounts every day.

Spammers create fake profiles to accomplish various malicious tasks. Sometimes they open accounts to make other account holders follow them. For this, they send users messages or friend request to deceive them to follow a link, persuading them to make a purchase or download malware by warning of low-quality proposition.

Moreover, spammers are using fake social profiles as an effective vector to generate webspam on good domains by searching opportunities on the web to host their links, redirects and malware. They infect these websites with two basic purposes - first the cost involve in it is zero; second they get advantage of sites' good reputation.

According to Google, benefits of high reputation of these sites reaping good results and has become very common now-a-days. Some bogus profiles that use popular pharmaceuticals are widely spreading on the Internet. For instance, researchers at Google have observed an emphatic upsurge in savvier spammers that exploit the real names and data to insert their malicious links.

Savvier spammers also embed links in hacked sites, comment spam and other profiles with an intention that their new gibberish profiles come in search results. This leads to a number of bad content on website's domain and unnecessary links from spam sites.

In addition, security experts have said that social profile spam is a subcategory of web spam comment spam that have been battering websites and blogs for many years. However, it is more pernicious than other attacks because users become complacent with regard to security while corresponding supposed friends.

Google have asked website operators as well as owners to do whatever possible to make their website strong against social profile spam. These steps include - use of CAPTCHA to block automated account creation, blacklisting of accounts associated with spam domains and protection against cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

A survey done by Internet security company 'Webroot' says that social networking website users are more vulnerable to financial losses, identity theft and malware insertions.

Related article: Google Rectifies Gmail flaw in Three Days

» SPAMfighter News - 7/8/2009