Pornographic images and videos began appearing on Google Groups pages over the weekend, along with infectious malware.
"These
pages push other porn pages for profit," said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of
security company Sunbelt Software, in a blog post.
"While not all of the redirects go to malware sites, we did observe some
redirects to a site which ultimately pushes a fake codec trojan, which, if
installed, results in a VirusHeat infection."
To prevent spammers from using automated methods to create and abuse new accounts, Google uses a Captcha challenge. However, Internet security company Websense said spammers have had a 20 percent success rate in cracking Google's Captcha system.
Sunbelt security researcher Adam Thomas said spammers probably are using bots to bypass Google's defenses.
Eckelberry said this apparently automated spam assault on Google Groups appears to be new.
"We've seen similar types of things with other Google services (Blogger and Pages), but I believe this is a fairly recent phenomenon," he said. "One assumes with absolutely zero cost in setup and automated systems doing the work, it's probably quite profitable."
Google Groups also are being set up to promote spam blogs, or splogs, for certain search keywords.
"We have removed the Google Groups and accounts in question for violating our terms of service," a Google spokesperson said. "Google is committed to preventing spam and other forms of abuse on Google Groups. We encourage users to notify us of any issues."
Google Groups is a free discussion forum for anyone with a Google account.
