An affiliate spam (pharmacy spam, replica spam, insurance spam, finance spam…) group has exploited several websites. The exploited websites include academic institutions such as California State University Chico Campus (www.csuchico.edu) and Universidad de Guadlajara Centro Universitario de la Costa Sur in Mexico (www.cucsur.udg.mx). A series of affiliate spam exploitations has hit the California State campus especially hard. At its Progressive Student Union website (www.csuchico.edu/psu/), hundreds of spam pages have been discovered. Continue reading →

Carnegie Mellon University is one of the academic institutions that offer nation’s best graduate programs in computer science. Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute has its own subdomain at sei.cmu.edu. This institute’s website has been under attack by forum spammers these days. Continue reading →

If you take a close look at the screenshot to the right, you may notice a few very odd aspects. A Google search shows three results for a particular medication called tramadol. Wait… We aren’t exactly looking at Google’s search results, are we? If you see the URL, it says “alycium.com/search/” It took us a few minutes to figure out what’s going on with this screen. It seems that a pharmacy spammer exploited alycium.com’s website and installed a webpage that resembles Google’s search results screen.

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There are simple reasons why academic institutions keep falling victims to pharmacy spam. Three major reasons are Not interested Unvisited Unmonitored For example, what is wrong with the screenshot at the top right? Well, this exploitation is about 10 days old. We did inform West Virginia University right after we first reported the incident here. But our notification has apparently been ignored.

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We get a few spam comments every day at this blog website. We make news out of them. When the exploited website belongs to an academic institution, we often try to notify them of the exploitation and abuse.

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