Over the weekend, the lab stumbled upon a spambot application that capitalizes on Chuck Norris' popularity to boost a particular site's search engine ranking via spamdexing. It is used to poison search results and tricks the search engine into ranking a site high in the search result list.

The spambot installer, which is detected as Application:W32/Spambot.A drops PE files upon installation, and then attempts to connect to a website that sells various programs for PHP board flooding and chat flooding. It advertises the spambot application as "[the] best app to get your site ranked high on the search results."



The string "Chuck Norris" is one of the many strings (mostly in Polish) that are defined to be highlighted on the result page when a user conducts an entry search. In addition to highlighting keywords, the application can also be used to harvest e-mail addresses, automate clicking and crawl over websites in order to drive traffic to a particular site.