ZDNet exploited via Google Docs

January 19th, 2009 by Shara Grifenhagen | Category: Spam Favorites | 6 Comments »

Google Docs has really been exploited a lot in the last few months. In December, there was the outbreak with unconnected links, in November we saw dating and pharmaceuticals and last May, we first wrote about it.

A recent attack has exploited the popular tech site, ZDNet by stating that the document has been recommended by their Tech Update service.

As seen in the example above, a recipient could be easily tricked into believing that the message is a tech article recommended by someone in the community; both the “Sender” and the closing line refer to the Tech Update service.

Upon clicking the link, however, the document being hosted on Google Docs is actually an advertisement for International Rx.

What WILL those guys think of next!?

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  • http://twitter.com/commtouch/statuses/1130029842 commtouch (Commtouch)

    ZDNet exploited via Google Docs http://tinyurl.com/7vef5w

  • http://www.dbconnect.com Roger Carter

    Nice blog post. You’d think Google would have gotten it right after they bought Postini, wouldn’t you?

    I keep hounding Google about their awful GMAIL SPAM filter as well. I still get false positives on a weekly basis, and unfortunately I use GMAIL to run my business. It’s pretty embarrassing to have to tell a client he was mistaken for SPAM.

    One of these days Google will wake up and give Commtouch a call…

  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2398 Vendor claims ZDNet being “exploited” to send spam, forgets definition of exploit | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

    [...] what the spammers are really doing. In a recent blog post, anti-spam vendor Commtouch claims that ZDNet is being exploited in order to spend spam. The title of the post insinuates that systems hosted by ZDNet are being used to send out spam, [...]

  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2399 My bad! ZDNet actually was sending out spam! | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

    [...] must apologize to the bloggers over at Commtouch. It turns out a website hosted at ZDNet, partially retired in 2004, was the culprit. What did I [...]

  • http://twitter.com/Panda_Security/statuses/1133804393 Panda_Security (Panda Security)

    ZDNet exploited via Google Docs http://tinyurl.com/7vef5w

  • http://ZDNet John Potter

    We’re really embarrassed about this. The Spammers found an old application that we thought was shut down in 2004. We shut it down for real as soon as we found out about the problem.

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