Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
1. My name is always the hyperlinked title and no other words are linked.
2. When I click, it goes to a spam page with lists of famous names and other keywords along with my name, which is not so famous. There's a lot of autogenerated text on the page.
When I look deeper, these spam pages use hacked servers and parasite hosting for an iframe. But I still am not clear about how my name gets added into that content. And why would it be added, since I'm not famous? I even see these spam pages in the regular search results for my name sometimes.
It makes me wonder if the database for Google Alerts has been hacked and the spammers learn what keywords are being monitored. What do you think?
How or why you're name gets picked up and added into those scraped and autogenerated pages - especially as a link - is a bit of a mystery. It's kind of spooky! I somehow doubt that Google Alerts has actually been hacked, although anything is possible.
It seems more likely that this particular spammer scraped your name along with the rest of the content from some place or other and it just autogenerated through their page generation script.
But if it happened to me, I would also be suspicious, I'm sure. The whole thing has an odd feeling to it. I wonder if they might grab email packets meant for other computers and sift through them for Google Alerts messages.
I would be surprised if a hacker could intercept mail from google to you without getting into either google's or your mail server. Intercepting mail is possible but requires some means of pulling in the traffic stream. I would have thought that implied a hack into some serious traffic routers unless they have hacked your own mail server.
