Has Google Plus Become A Google Owned Spam Bot?
- Posted by Jordan
- 01 July 2011
Google have this week announced the release of their new social networking sector, Google Plus, a site that seems to be geared towards trying to rival online networking giant Facebook but it seems that in their rush to develop the site, Google could well have undone themselves.
With Google users flooding to enter through the Google Plus doors following their announcement, extensive testing of capabilities has been under way as users across the globe look to find faults and flaws in the site, only hours after the site was brought into circulation to the public.
Our own research has revealed a huge potential issue within the release of the site that could potentially cause security issues for millions of email users after it was revealed that you could auto subscribe email users that were not using the Gmail emailing platform into updates that you make on the site, locking them into the updates without any way in which they can opt out.
The issues do not simply stop at the email contacts that you have within your contacts either, Google Plus offering a strange ability to be able to send out messages, links, pictures and videos to contacts that you have never even spoken to…
The result is that all of the emails that are featured within the ‘social circle’ that you are targeting all receive an email from Google, sharing your latest addition.
Okay so you think that that’s not too big of a problem, after all the internet is full of spam emails and we can simply unsubscribe from them, not this time!
Due to the fact that non-Gmail users are also receiving these emails, they do not have the capability to be able to click on the unsubscribe link within the email because of a resulting 404 error page that shows:
Okay it all seems a little bit strange but where is the danger?
The likelihood is that Google are going to work on rectifying the issues within their new release but in the meantime, malicious internet users now have a huge opportunity to be able to quickly and easily spread viruses, Trojans and botnets across the globe, meaning that anything within one of these updates could potential be fatal to your machine and in certain circumstances, you.
Tags: danger, google plus, spam, trojan, virus
