This Is How the European Banking Authority Site Is Abused by Pirate Site Promoters
- Scammers are uploading PDFs containing piracy-related search terms to rank up on Google results.
- The websites that host these files have a good reputation, so the trick is working exceptionally well.
- The actors are abusing a backdoor on these sites to continue the upload of the files daily.
Newton’s law of action and reaction applies to an array of things, including the ever-raging tug of war between pirate sites and Google’s search indexing algorithms. With every measure that the tech giant takes to shove these sites deeply down the search results pages, pirates respond with sincere efforts to “trick” the system and get back up.
As noticed and reported by TorrentFreak, there’s a peculiar case of abusing the website of the European Banking Authority (EBA) going on right now, and it seems to be working quite well.
The scammers are uploading PDFs filled with piracy-related search terms that people seeking something online are likely to type on Google. Because Google does not mark the EBA website as risky or illegal, the content on these PDFs is indexed, so Google Search displays the results high up. The upload works thanks to a backdoor that the actors have found, and although the EBA site admins are actively removing these files, more keep on coming all the time.
The EBA site isn’t the only site facing this problem right now anyway, as the scammers are looking to do the same thing on any reputable organization they can identify as exploitable. Another example is Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety website, which appears to be hosting the same PDF files. So, all in all, the trick is working, and the scammers will continue to follow the same method until Google finds a way to address it.
On that part, we should comment that when it comes to addressing problems that appear “simple,” the solution can be far from that. The scammers are now abusing a gap in the system that isn’t easy to plug, and even if the websites find their backdoors and fix them, the actors will continue to seek and abuse other websites. The solution must be given on the Google level, but again, this is practically very challenging.