WordPress, Google Groups, Porn Spam and Malware Distribution

I was cleaning out spam comments today, thinking about how this site got hacked a few days ago. Most of the spam comments that bypass Akismet on this site link to pages full of spam on Google Groups. Google Groups is getting to be worse than MySpace in that respect.

Here is how the spam works:

These WordPress comments spamming Google Groups porn don’t get caught by Akismet:

The spammer(s) probably don’t care if the link is nofollowed. The direct traffic is enough.

Here is what you see when you go to Google Groups – click on the image below for the larger screenshot:

Clicking on that image takes you to a page that aggressively tries to install a file called “setup.exe” on your computer:

If you want to see the extent of it, [warning: the next link goes to Google search results with explicit keywords] click here . 198,000 pages indexed:

Popularity: 11% [?]