SEO Spammers Leave Chilean Miners Alone

For all the media buzz surrounding the rescue of 33 Chilean miners, the SANS Internet Storm Center hasn't seen much of any search engine optimization spam. SEO spam is a popular way attackers leverage the popularity of a news event to draw in Web surfers to malicious websites. These sites masquerade as news sites, or advertise a fake piece of information. The more users click, the higher the malicious site climbs to the top of the search engine.

With the story of the Chilean miners, however, the SEO spam spotted by SANS on Google has been almost non-existent. There could be a couple reasons for this. It's possible, though unlikely, that hackers found some inspiration in the story and were less inclined to take advantage of it. But what probably happened is Google stepped up its game. In other words, Google has done a better job of spotting these rogue sites and cleaning them up. Too often, the media only points out the bad, but in this case, Google appears to deserve some recognition for not allowing a popular news story to wreak havoc on its users.