Google Purges Thousands of Malware Sites

Stony Stevenson sends in word on the most massive "SEO poisoning" seen to date. The attack was directed at Google in particular and resulted in tens of thousands of Web pages hosting exploits showing up on the first page of Google searches for thousands of common terms (PDF). Sunbelt Software blogged about the attack on Monday after investigating it for months. By Wednesday Google had removed tens of thousands of malware-hosting pages from its index.

I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

...welcome any move towards private pwnership of IE users.

Censoring

[Fredtalk]

Sounds like net censorship to me! What if I wanted to visit those malware sites?

Re:Some, but not all....

[toleraen]

Wide awake.

Bad news for...

[Tastecicles]

tech support. Now what're we supposed to do over the holiday season? Boxshift?

Little difference

[Armakuni]

From the summary: tens of thousands of Web pages hosting exploits showing up on the first page of Google searches for thousands of common terms

So, how do you tell the difference between this and any normal Google results page?

Re:The keywords ..

[gzerphey]

I remember hearing something about the Windows random number generator...

Re:They've also changed their PageRank for many si

[Rob T Firefly]

I was no longer the #1 hit for: Bill Roehl, "Bill Roehl", or any variation thereof.

Perhaps there is simply someone else who is better at being Bill Roehl than you. Don't fret, though. You can always go back to Bill Roehl School and brush up with some post-graduate Bill Roehl stuff.

Personally, I'm comfortable with the fact that I'm only the second-best me [google.com] out there. Let that other fella have his glory, because I'm never going back to the Rob Vincent Academy. I'm not going into it here, but those bastards Rob, Rob, and Rob know why.

Re:BBC News piece

[Inda]

I search for 'fetch doggy go go go go go microsoft vpn excel' all the time. The top result was my favourite site until this happened.

Stalinism

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the rights of those spammers? They're living in an impoverished third world country (Russia) and are just trying for a better life. They're no different than the home shopping network or eBay.

And you won't tolerate them. You deny them their civil rights. You deny them their FREEDOM OF SPEECH!

This is outright Stalinism. It's not their fault fat, stupid, bored, lonely Americans will buy products geared toward the intelligence of a labrador. They're just trying to feed their families... to be part of the AMERICAN DREAM.

You Stalinists and your purges, your nights of the long knives, you're endangering the freedom of all of us. If you purge spammers from Google, the terrorists win.