Security News > 2022 > November > Google Search results poisoned with torrent sites via Data Studio
Threat actors are abusing Google's Looker Studio to boost search engine rankings for their illicit websites that promote spam, torrents, and pirated content.
BleepingComputer has come across several pages of Google search results flooded with datastudio.
These links, rather than representing a legitimate Google Data Studio project, are minisites that host links to pirated content.
Introduced in 2016 by Google, Looker Studio is a web-based business intelligence tool that enables users to transform data into customizable informative reports and dashboard for easy visualization and analysis.
Data Studio can be and has been used to, for example, track and visualize the download counts of open source packages for a given period.
BleepingComputer has reached out to Google in advance of publishing to understand how Google plans on tackling the issue and we are awaiting their response.