Google Alert sent me to a spyware/virus page

[trinorthlighting]

I was astonished. I was emailed a Google alert for a term I had set up. I got an email from Google yesterday and the snippet looked like something I wanted to read. I clicked on the link, there were a few redirects and bam, I was at one of those pages that downloads spyware/virus to my PC. Needless to say my PC was infected and I had to clean it out. Come on Google, you can do better than that.

[tedster]

Given the troubles with Google Alerts recently [webmasterworld.com], I suppose this was bound to happen. It is pretty sad.

[trinorthlighting]

I know it is sad. Now I just can not trust to click on the URL's for the alerts. You think with Google being as good as they are they would pick this up a bit better.

[Bewenched]

Yup .. get them all the time ... especially scraper sites in Poland using a mish-mash of sites content and then tries to load malware. I really wish that google alerts had another button or link that would notify them when we find things like that or scraped content and/or spam. sure would save me going into WMT to report links.

[onepointone]

S'Happened to me a few times recently. Now I look at the url before clicking, if I dont recognise it, no click.

[Wlauzon]

Been seeing this a few times lately also. First popped up about 3 weeks ago.

Perhaps some Google filtering gone awry?

[trinorthlighting]

It seems as if the Google filter is behind the alerts. The original page was cached in Google and the alert was sent. I noticed this morning Google removed that result from the index and the page is no longer cached. It is obvious that Google picked it up at some point of time. I wish Google would scan the page for the virus/spyware downloads before sending the Google alerts rather than scanning after they send the Google alert.

[bwnbwn]

I have been seeing these for months now and had to quit using the alerts because of it.

I think a site will get infected and the hacker will add tons of text or domain names as a means of getting these alerts sent out for users that use the alert then are directed to an infected site from clicking on a Google alert.

I assume the alert is sent before the google bot has a chance to scan the site and pick up on it's being infected. Even if it picks it up and removes the site from the index the site is still active waiting on you to click the alert in your webmaster tools section.

Due to this security issue I have quit with clicking on any alerts as I did try to do the hover thing as well but still went to infected sites that had been hacked The URL's in the alerts weren't what you would be alerted to as dangerous.

trinorthlighting if you think about it this is a really clever way to get webmasters to go to a site they normally wouldn't go to and get infected, plus the added benfit of most users with alerts have multiple domains they manage and it only increases the odds he/she will get infected.