Published: January 28 2010, 07:49 AM
by Methusela Cebrian Ferrer

Apple unveiled its latest innovation called the iPad. This is a highly anticipated announcement after months of rumors and speculations. As expected, hours later, discussions, impressions and sarcasm roared over the internet. [read “Apple’s iPad Event Broke the Internets”]  

[Figure 01 - Example Blackhat SEO scraper site. A scraper site is a website that displays harvested content from other websites for the purpose of monetizing it. The content is usually updated by bots.]      

Apparently, Apple iPad became “hot” trending topics in Twitter and Google, and guess what?  Blackhat SEO scraper sites immediately observed luring in search engine results hoping to cash-in -- just a click away.

[Figure 02 - Mac users are redirected to ZML{dot}com] 

This scrapper sites sells traffic to fellow cybercriminals. When the user click the URL and follow the website, the browser sends information through USER-AGENT to the server. It then identifies, whether you are running Mac OS X or Windows platform.

In this case (and as observed recently), Mac users Blackhat SEO traffic are redirected to ZML.com. The main objective of this website is to get your credit card details by enticing users to pay 99cents membership activation to download 10 pirated movies. Recent user reports confirmed that this website will perform fraudulent charges to your credit card. 

“OEM software” scamming scheme is also targeting Mac users.

        [Figure 03 - Mac users are redirected to Google look-a-like website]

Aside from targeting your credit card, some traffic goes to a typo-squatted website. This technique aims to capture more users’ traffic and serve manipulated results. 

If there’s nothing specific for Mac users, then a Rogue security alert will hijack your Safari browser especially if you are running Windows.

            [Figure 04 - Example rogue security alert message]

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