Russian Trump Fan Celebrates By Successfully Hacking Google Analytics

By Lordson Okpetu

Check your Google Analytics report section now and it’s pretty much guaranteed that you have a referral from secret.google.com, thenextweb.com, abc.xyz , a mix of them or more. That’s the handiwork of a Russian Trump fan, Vitaly Popov, celebrating Trump’s victory.

It’s interesting to know that Vitaly the spammer has also been bold enough to set some of the referral domains as abc.xyz – Google’s parent company, as well as thenextweb.com for daring to run some few articles about his antics.

“Vitaly Popov is only trying to use Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to create hits and send those to your Google Analytics property,” explains TheNextWeb.

“These hits seem like they’re coming from thenextweb.com, but they’re not.”

The referral spam hack consistently appears as a strange country in your analytics dashbord. The country name reads “Secret.ɢoogle.com You are invited! Enter only with this ticket URL. Copy it. Vote for Trump!”

Once clicked on, the link will take you to the destination shown below with a url made up of over a paragraph of text; lyrics of “Money” by Pink Floyd actually:

http://money get away get a good job with more pay and you are okay money it is a gas grab that cash with both hands and make a stash new car caviar four star daydream think i ll buy me a football team money get back i am alright jack ilovevitaly com/# keep off my stack money it is a hit do not give me that do goody good bullshit i am in the hi fidelity first class travelling set and i think i need a lear jet money it is a secret %C9%A2oogle com/# share it fairly but dont take a slice of my pie money so they say is the root of all evil today but if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they are giving none and secret

How does this affect you?
You do not have to worry about your rankings or anything related to SEO as a result of the hack.

Peter Velchev from Dowser told TNW that:

“Referral spam like Secret.Google.com basically creates false visits to your website. The idea behind this is that once you see the URL of the new visitor, you might be tempted to trace it back to its source. This would in turn generate real visits to the hacker’s website, thus pushing it up the rating ladder.”

However, ICON reports that small to medium-sized businesses’ acquisition data may become skewed due to this fake traffic hits. This could lead to poor decision making by webmasters.

You may therefore, want to get rid of spam in your analytics account by following this tutorial provided by TNW.

The fear

The fearful part for many webmasters is the limit Vitaly can go to in hacking almighty google since he was reported to have been successfully hacking the search engine giant since 2015.

This latest Vitaly hack is almost two weeks old and google seems incapable of doing anything about it.