Find infected web pages on educational web sites
Many American university websites have sections that hackers/spammers use (or recently used) for their link farms.
This page shows how to use Google to prove this.
To narrow your searches to (mostly) educational web sites, use Google's site:edu command. It will match all *.edu sites.
Any of the following searches will fetch links to compromised web pages with hidden links or redirects.
Copy and paste the search strings into the google search box or click the link next to each query to search in a new window/tab.
site:edu viagra tamiflu buy in new window
site:edu income tax phentermine order ultram in new window
site:edu buy ambien online in new window
site:edu "Refinance private student loan" in new window
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site:edu "Cheap Vista for Students" in new window
Note: These searches can only reveal certain types of hidden links. Other types of hidden links cannot be revealed this way. Google also can't be used to find other types of potentially harmful content such as iframes, malicious scripts and redirects.
Google search results don't represent current sites' state. Google's index is usually a few minutes to a couple of weeks old. The above searches can return pages that have already been cleaned since the last Google update. On the other hand, some pages could have been infected after the last Google update, and the searches will return nothing.
To have more real-time information about most types of potentially harmful hidden content on you web pages, use the Unmask Parasites service.
Stop spammers. Spread the word.
Educational sites are very valuable for spammers since Google favors links from .edu sites.
Hopefully, it can be relatively easy to throw spammers out of university web servers. We just need to make universities do what they should do - keep their web servers secure:
- Pass the link to this page to universities' officials and let them know their system administrators and web masters don't pay due attention to security issues or maybe even act on behalf of spammers.
- Spread the word, create some buzz around this issue. Make it harder for them to neglect the problem.
What next?
Now that you know how many sites are infected, it's time to check your own site.