Criminals use Google's Looker Studio (formerly called Google Data Studio) to improve the rankings of their illegal websites that offer spam, torrents, and pirated content.
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The SEO poisoning attack analyzed by BleepingComputer uses datastudio.google.com to make malicious domains appear more trustworthy.
Abuse of Data Studio to improve the ranking of illegal content websites
BleepingComputer spotted several Google Search flooded with datastudio.google.com links – a reader of the page first reported this strange behavior, and BleepingComputer then investigated it.
These links, which rather than indicating an authorized Google Data Studio project, are mini-websites that provide access to pirated content.
For example, such a search result directs users searching for “Download Terrifier 2 (2022)” to bit.ly links that redirect further multiple times to finally land on a website with spam content – of course they have to click to be directed there.
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The screenshots below show examples of the SEO poisoning campaign, which embeds keywords into web content to illegally improve a domain's ranking.
Clicking on one of these Bit.ly URLs redirects the user to sites that promote online surveys, streaming sites of questionable legitimacy and authenticity, and spam:
Looker Studio, introduced in 2016 by Google, is a web-based business intelligence tool that helps users create informative reports from data.
Data Studio can be used to track data over time, such as the number of open source.
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In the past, SEO poisoning campaigns have targeted keywords related to the US midterm elections. However, recently, the same types of campaigns were discovered promoting Zoom, TeamViewer , and Visual Studio with malware.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
