There were some security-related announcements and news from Google on how they fight spam in search results in the past few days. Here are the highlights …
A security flaw was discovered in the Elementor WordPress theme that could, under the right circumstances, allow a malicious user to take over a website. Elementor has issued an update, so if you are using Elementor, make sure you’re running at least version 3.6.4. This is another reminder to keep your installs up-to-date.
There was an update for Google’s Chrome browser that included some security fixes. This is the second update that has included security-related fixes in recent weeks. If you haven’t already, be sure to update to the latest version to avoid problems with your system.
Google issued the 2021 Webspam Report this week. In this edition of the annual report, Google shared some data on improvements in detecting and eliminating poor-quality search results, especially those stemming from spammy links and scams, and online harassment. The report also refers to detecting websites that ride the edge of recommendations laid out in Google’s Website Quality Rater Guidelines to manipulate search results with low-quality content. The primary tool for this work is SpamBrain, an AI system Google that has significantly improved spam detection since its launch in 2018.
In other security news, two vulnerabilities were found in the Drupal content management system. While not as popular as WordPress, Drupal runs a significant number of websites.
