The operation appears to be highly organized, with groups like “Neon SEO Academy” and “SEOLink” offering illicit SEO services for phishing and online casino fraud. With search engine providers still in the dark about it, the operation has taken root in Turkey, already boosting illicit businesses there.
“So far, most of the activity seems to be centered around the Turkish market, primarily in online gambling and escort services,” Sebborn added. “As for the search engines, there’s no clear indication yet that they’ve been notified about these campaigns or how they’ve responded. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a public effort or statement from them addressing this type of ranking abuse.”
Chris Gray, Field CTO at Deepwatch, believes SEO poisoning operations, such as Hacklink, will bolster Phishing and SMShing campaigns all over. “Estimates say that there will be over a trillion phishing emails sent this year, and these attacks are expected to be involved in ~36% of all data breaches,” Gray added. “SEO poisoning doesn’t necessarily mean that these attacks will be more successful, but it does mean that even legitimate communications are more likely to contain malicious links.”
