Certain ISPs, like Earthlink, have been creating pages that send users that type in the incorrect name of a popular website (like if you put in yahooo.com) to an ad-plastered page owned by the ISPs ad partners. This doesn’t sound so bad (although, anybody knows that person meant to go to Yahoo) and the page would give suggestions about what the user really wanted to go to.

The problem is that these fake, incorrect web addresses are extremely insecure and allows hackers to set up copycat sites on insecure subdomains.

This has given hackers a chance at effectively attacking users. For example, they could send spam emails to ISP users and link to a non-existent subdomain (the example given in the Wired article is money.paypal.com). When users click in to the site the hackers have created by hacking into the ISPs ad partners weak servers, they may see a PayPal clone and then enter their username and password, which a Trojan would pick up and allow the hackers to go hog-wild.

Thanks to Ryan Singel at Wired

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:23 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.