Creative virus-mails

Johannes Beus
At the moment there is a huge amount of virus-mails that are acting on Google's importance. The “Google Search Quality Team” - which is fake naturally – that the site had to be removed form the index due to a violation of the Google-guidelines. The startpage is supposed to redirect with a non-by-the-book redirect. To re-include the site into the index, the mail asks you to use the Google webmaster-tool which is, conveniently added to the mail. Faris for example has a full abstract of the e-mail.

If we take a look at the backlash over at Technorati or the Google Blogsearch, we can see that many webmasters thought the e-mail to be genuine which led them to contritely announce the imminent removal of their site from the Googleindex.

So: sure enough, this e-mail is a fake and the appended file a virus. Google webmaster-tools really do exist, but they are a web-application and can not be downloaded and used offline.
Johannes Beus - on Wed (05/09/2007) at 22:17 PM

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