- Bad actors have hijacked webpages to advertise drugs and guns.
- They can do so because Google has changed how it indexes web content.
- Websites for government agencies, schools, and news organizations were hit.
If you're looking to score some coke online, Google has made it a little easier — with an unsuspecting assist from the Food and Drug Administration, Interpol, the United Nations, and dozens of other government agencies, businesses, and nonprofits.
"Cocaine for sale here," the page hosted on the FDA's website said alongside a telephone number and a handle for the encrypted-messaging app Wickr. "Buy crystal meth online."
The culprit is a recent change by Google that makes defacing websites with advertisements for where to buy cocaine, heroin, meth, ketamine, Xanax, black-market Ozempic, ecstasy, and other drugs suddenly a viable way to find customers.
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Many websites set up their internal search functionality in a way that creates a new, permanent webpage for every unique search string that users enter — effectively giving users the power to create a webpage on the site. When you enter "see Jane run" into the search box on the FDA's webpage, for instance, the site creates a search-result page with its own unique address to show you the results, whether there are any hits or not. (The FDA blocked pages with drug ads after Insider alerted the agency they existed.)
What's new is that Google now shows those results pages to people searching the internet, Ted...
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