SEO Fraud | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on a previously undocumented threat cluster dubbed GhostRedirector that has managed to compromise at least 65 Windows servers primarily located in Brazil, Thailand, and Vietnam. The attacks, per Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, led to the deployment of a passive C++ backdoor called Rungan and a native Internet Information Services (IIS) module codenamed Gamshen. The threat actor is believed to be active since at least August 2024. "While Rungan has the capability of executing commands on a compromised server, the purpose of Gamshen is to provide SEO fraud as-a-service, i.e., to manipulate search engine results, boosting the page ranking of a configured target website," ESET researcher Fernando Tavella said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Even though Gamshen only modifies the response when the request comes from Googlebot – i.e., it does not serve malicious content or otherwise affect regular visitors of the ...

A "simplified Chinese-speaking actor" has been linked to a new campaign that has targeted multiple countries in Asia and Europe with the end goal of performing search engine optimization (SEO) rank manipulation. The black hat SEO cluster has been codenamed DragonRank by Cisco Talos, with victimology footprint scattered across Thailand, India, Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and China. "DragonRank exploits targets' web application services to deploy a web shell and utilizes it to collect system information and launch malware such as PlugX and BadIIS, running various credential-harvesting utilities," security researcher Joey Chen said . The attacks have led to compromises of 35 Internet Information Services ( IIS ) servers with the end goal of deploying the BadIIS malware, which was first documented by ESET in August 2021. It's specifically designed to facilitate proxy ware and SEO fraud by turning the compromised IIS server into a relay point for mal...