Blackhat SEO expert explores Digg and Reddit sites
By Gina on October 14, 2010 | Spam and email, Blackhat SEO, Digg, Reddit, social bookmarking sites, spam links
It is not surprising that poisoned links spread across the World Wide Web and they mostly target major search engines. Social bookmarking sites as Digg and Reddit are not an exception.
A blackhat SEO expert announced about his attempt to drive traffic from Reddit to his blog entries. The expert posted how he was able to intrude to Reddit site. In this case, he used fake accounts to artificially boost voting on selected stories.
An attack against Reddit appeared to be easy as pie. Blackhat SEO compromised Reddit with his new accounts that were used to help to vote for spammer’s articles. The spammer did this process automatically. The minus of this case was to overcome CAPTCHAs for the new accounts.
Understandable that this development had to have real voters for these articles because scammer’s intentions could have been easily discovered and the links could have been removed from the system. Votes are definitely needed for new users of the system but it has its limits and that has not to be compromised if one wants to hide their malicious intentions.
Social bookmarking sites contain links to other websites. The links may raise Google ranking of those web sources. However, these techniques did not do any particular damage or harm to anyone. Only the owners of Digg and Reddit sites are not satisfied with it because their reputation was shattered.
All in all, there are no such social bookmarking sites that are untouchable by scammers. These kinds of attacks can be easily used by cybercriminals as well. For this time, attack was not with the purpose to spread malware.
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