14 DAY TRIAL // Google receives tons of spam every day, no matter if the unsolicited content is delivered to Gmail, Google SERP or Google Groups. But this latest service seems to be the one which is most affected by the spam messages because the users turn to Google Groups in order to find information about a certain service or feature and, instead of valuable details, it is assaulted with lots of useless messages obviously posted with advertising purposes. Patrick Altoft from SEOptimise discovered an interesting Google Groups spam which uses a hidden Javascript injection to redirect the users to another website and drive traffic to it.
It seems like the entire exploit is supported by the Google Groups upload files feature which enabled the spammer to publish a script in the forum. "Each Google Group has a space to upload files but this facility seems to be being abused by spammers. Pages redirect straight to Made For Adsense websites using Javascript hidden in the Google Groups page," the blogger wrote in the article.
Obviously, this is a pretty easy way to earn money on the web since most of the spammers are redirecting the users to pages 'equipped' with Google AdSense. This Google product automatically transfers a certain amount of money to owners' accounts every time a visitor clicks on an ad. Because lots of Internet consumers are redirected to the page by the malicious script, many of them might click on the adverts and bring money to the spammer. Easy, don't you think?
Moreover, the attacker might try to get his site listed on Google's search engine using the Google Groups discussion forums and bring additional visitors to the page. "This group don't seem to be being indexed in Google as far as I can see but there are already reports of the spam groups showing up in search results for other queries," Patrick Altoft added in the article.