14 DAY TRIAL // Security experts from McAfee and from Barracuda Labs have come across an interesting spam campaign that abuses Google Translate to lure users to rogue pharmacy websites.
It all starts with emails that bear subject lines such as these: “If your wife in bed resembles a log apply pure magic of pharmacy!” or “Autumn is the season of giant savings all over the world! Boost your health.”
The links contained in these emails appear to point to google.com/translate, which might lead recipients to believe that there’s nothing dangerous about them. However, that’s far from the truth.
When clicked, the links access Google Translate, which in turn fetches a shortened URL that points to a compromised website. Google translates a piece of text from this compromised website, after which it executes some code hosted on it.
The translated text is displayed in an iframe, but the code executed from the compromised site manages to break out of the iframe and redirects the victim to the pharmacy website.
Barracuda Labs experts say that Google might be working on implementing a mechanism to prevent such redirects, but the tests they’ve performed are inconclusive.