Published November 22, 2022
Author: Ash Khan

Google Looker Studio is being misused in order to promote harmful websites.

Cybercriminals are targeting Google Looker Studio in order to promote spam, illegal content, and torrents on the search engine’s results pages. Talk about premium SEO services done by torrent sites! 

The campaign employs a strategy called SEO poisoning. Cybercriminals use real website material and populate it with connections to these malicious sites. The links provide the spam sites enough legitimacy in the eyes of Google’s search engine algorithm for the tool to rank them high for specified keywords.

What is SEO Poisoning?

SEO poisoning, also known as search poisoning, is a type of cyberattack in which attackers establish harmful websites and employ search engine optimization techniques to make them appear prominently in search results. The sites are connected with terms that a large number of people are likely to be searching for at any one moment, such as holiday phrases, news items, and viral videos. According to an online security website, dangerous websites may be found on up to a quarter of the first page of search results for trendy subjects.

Why do cybercriminals use SEO Poisoning?

Attackers create websites with names and descriptions that are related to popular or current trends. They can build websites with movies or give free Halloween costume ideas or Christmas gifts and in some cases, they may develop holiday recipe sites. The sites may contain no material or may contain content stolen from legit sites. However, the real aim is to infect visitors with malware and compromise their email security. Malware on the site may use the visitor’s computer to connect to a botnet or install a Trojan horse to steal login information. Another ruse is to offer the consumer a product that they believe they are purchasing in order to obtain their credit card information.

How do torrent sites use SEO?

After being informed by a concerned reader, a cyber security website discovered many pages of Google search results “flooded with datastudio.google.com URLs.” The torrent vulnerability utilizes Google workspace’s parent company Data Studio. The connections do not go to a Google Data Studio project, but rather to websites that store stolen content, such as recent hit movies. Before arriving at these websites, victims will be routed many times. SEO poisoning is used by threat actors to increase their chances of delivering malware to more endpoints.

How does SEO poisoning affect users?

The majority of the time, SEO poisoning is used to boost torrent sites to the top of Google’s results pages for queries like commercial software, the latest movies, or computer games. Consumers wishing to save money on software and games may visit malware-infected websites these websites lack security encryption; they do not even have SSL certificates. The main reason behind visiting such websites is that they offer activation keys or crack versions of software like Microsoft office 365.

Most of the time, activation keys or crack versions do not operate properly instead spread viruses or malware. These dangerous applications are capable of wreaking havoc in a variety of ways, including installing bitcoin miners, stealing personal data, delivering ransomware, and leaving systems or your websites in need of thorough website repair.

Preventing SEO poisoning attacks

To avoid SEO poisoning scams:

  1. Keep your browser and secure website checker software up to date
  2. Avoid opening suspicious-looking links
  3. Never disclose personal information online unless you’re confident the site is legitimate, and the transaction is safe.

Check out IT Company’s finest website repair services right now.