Terragen spam in google search

Started by aknight0, February 20, 2022, 11:36:46 PM

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aknight0

Anyone else getting weird spam in Google searches related to Terragen?  Want to make sure it's not just my computer.  

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WAS

The membership system may have been compromised for WordPress, it is advised to upgrade to the latest version. Old versions of WP have an exploit that you can register, and then change the role of the user to administrator or even key user.

But yeah, the search results for Terragen are absolutely wrecked now for me... It's even bolding all the things related to drugs like those are the hottest keywords with the site. :\

I was afraid of this happening. These software systems are too widely known, and exploits are being found all the time. They really should think about more security measures in WordPress and SMF Forums. Code on the website is randomly changing too. A offset I specifically coded for the forums front page to 85px, to centre it in the spacing provided, randomly changed to 83px, and now part of the images that should be hidden are visible (red dashed looking line near no new posts icon). It sounds like some one has a backdoor into the site. Which is scary for everyone's memberships, financial information, keys, etc. This would need to be publicly disclosed if this is the case with spam of this degree across the entire site, and code changing, etc. CrisB said no one has touched the forum theme. There is no way that value can spontaneously change. Why it would be changed at all is strange, but here we are with all this stuff going on in general.

WAS

Hmm I only see one bad result when I look on my phone. I use brave browser. I suspect we are also infected with tracking cookies to tailor our results to maximize whatever the hell the spammers are doing. Cause only difference here is this browser isn't set to store cookies.

Dune

Yeah, it's google. I use Duckduckgo for some time now (better for privacy), and though results are less good, there's nothing wrong with those links. I did come across some stolen images though.

WAS

Quote from: Dune on February 21, 2022, 02:57:14 AMYeah, it's google. I use Duckduckgo for some time now (better for privacy), and though results are less good, there's nothing wrong with those links. I did come across some stolen images though.

Yeah I see that sometimes. Images taken and altered for some wallpaper website.

KlausK

I just tried a few TG related searches with G++gle - everything ok. No spam or strange results.
But I am running a rather obsolete system OS and accompanying software. My Firefox version is still in its 80s ;)

CHeers, Klaus
/ ASUS WS Mainboard / Dual XEON E5-2640v3 / 64GB RAM / NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 TI / Win7 Ultimate . . . still (||-:-||)

aknight0

Glad I'm not the only one, but strange that it's not everyone.  Maybe it's location-dependent?  I get the same weird results from searching "Planetside Terragen" across Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo, with Chrome, Firefox and Edge, both on mobile and PC.  I was thinking to try through a VPN to see what that looks like, but haven't tried that yet.

Matt

We are investigating this. Typing in URLs directly shows the correct pages. But searches from Google are sometimes showing the wrong pages. I will report back on our findings.
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

WAS

I forgot to get back on this -- I cleared my cookies, cache, and everything on my PC and the search results were clean save for like two results deep in, same as on my phone. I think it is cookies tailoring results like google and Facebook and stuff does, just being done by spammers. If I search Terragen Pharmacy (chuckle at the thought) I do get a lot more results I was previously getting on searches and images. So I can target what I was getting before specifically, so that's why I think it's cookies causing us to see it. Why it's on PS though is a mystery to me.

Just to be sure I checked Google's submission to see if you can submit pages with bogus titles, and I saw nothing, and I searched about it and found nothing besides usual for webmasters. 🤷