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Microsoft to fix Bing spam bug

Elinor Mills CNET News

Published: 22 Oct 2009 10:01 BST

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Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it is fixing a bug in Bing that previously allowed spammers to bypass spam filters and distribute malicious links.

Researchers at Webroot Software discovered a spam campaign earlier this week that used the search engine's own redirection mechanism and a link-shrinking technique to send people to spam web pages, according to a post on the Webroot threat blog.

The problem stems from how Bing formats links in RSS feeds. The redirect from Bing to the spam site is not obfuscated, which has allowed scammers to append anything to the end of the Bing redirect URL and thus trick spam filters, said Andrew Brandt, a threat researcher at Webroot.

Please see Microsoft fixing Bing bug that aided spammers on CNET News for the full story.

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