May 9, 2006...1:05 am
When you Google too much
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This is what happens when you constantly google (yes I'm using it as a verb):
It's like an impulse to use google now. As soon as I open a tab in Firefox I can feel my fingers typing in that familar collection of g's, o's, l and e.
4 Comments
May 9, 2006 at 10:41 am
Spammers often search for exploits in software, for example, PHP Bulletin Board BB. To find the discussion boards that have the expoits they may search Google for “PHP bb version 2.9a” or some such term. They create bots to do this, which then automatically follow the links and try to exploit the buggy software, often installing bots on the infected machines to do the same thing i.e. search Google for other weak software. Google detects that there is an abnormally high frequency of particular search terms. Sometimes if you search for somthing similar, innocently, e.g. PHP bb, and you are using a particular user agent string (usually Firefox or some mozilla string), and you’re on a frequent user ip address of Google, then they will present the page you’ve shown on the post above.
It happened to us when one of our PHP bb boards was attacked and while we were looking into it we searched for the same query string as the hackers programme was doing. The way we fixed it was to upgrade the firefox browser we were using.
May 9, 2006 at 11:39 am
Interesting. Funnily, it happened to me as I was searching for google scholar and clicked “I’m feeling lucky”. That’s what led me to believe that it was based on number of searches made. Although I am behind a http proxy so it was probably just some other user running the much exploitable phpBB.
May 10, 2006 at 2:05 pm
I am not sure if this is the same problem I experienced, but I will keep checking out here to see more details on this.
Livinus Nosike
http://www.livinusnosike.com
June 6, 2006 at 2:29 am
Hmm, interesting! Haven’t heard of that happening…
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