Many members of the Google App Engine group have noticed a weird phenomenon in Google Groups today: a duplicate, and sometimes original, post appears in groups like the "American porn USA" and "adult mermaid costume" with added SEO keywords.

"The goal of this attack is clearly some sort of attempt to game search engines by associating their links with otherwise "quality" content," Jeff Schnitzer, who posted the problem earlier today on Hacker News, tells LAUNCH via email. Jeff is the founder of Similarity, a site for meeting people with common interests.

Hackers are adding words like "bignlife," "make money training" and "e-mail sending Job" to the posts, and then moving them to spam groups.

Jeff says that he has never seen anything like this before, though Google Groups is no stranger to spammers.

"When I look at my profile I see the spam posts show up as 'my' posts," Jeff says. "Others report the same. I doubt this is restricted to appengine groups; the attack is likely widespread across Google Groups but I don't have any specific examples."

The Google App Engine offers users the ability to build and host web applications, which is what the Google Group's discussion focuses on. But now, Jeff's post resides only in the adult mermaid costume group.

"Google Groups is under constant attack by spammers," Jeff says. "My public groups (mostly opensource projects) have 'always moderate first post by a new user' enabled to prevent spam from getting through and annoying the readers. Other than that, Google Groups is useful and I don't know of any other security issues."

LAUNCH has contacted Google and will update this story if we receive more information.

In July, Google Groups removed the option to "Add members directly" to googlegroups.com groups, citing that spammers abused that feature in the past.

Jeff says that when you create a public group, you will get periodic spam messages posted by bots that create accounts, join your group and then send spam.

"The amount of spam that comes in has varied with time but right now it's not too bad," Jeff says. "I used to trap spam in the moderation queue daily but today I see maybe one spam message every other month. Then again, my groups are small (less than 500 people); spammers most likely focus attention on the really big groups."

Back in June, Google pinned the Gmail hack on China, stating that they targeted the email accounts of senior US officials to intensify growing concern about the security of the Internet.

SCREEN SHOTS

Jeff's original post to Google App Engine.

Post on the spam group.

LAUNCH Blog