✈ ▌▌ = Google Trends Hacked Again

Some people apparently think it's funny to hack Google Trends. Last week, we witnessed a nice :-) in Trends, Google's mechanism to display the top search terms of the day.

Today, these jokesters have decided to place the image of an jet airplane flying into two towers on Google Trends.   The image looks like this... ✈ ▌▌.

Google Trends has been hacked several times in the past and one has to wonder what they can do to prevent such tampering.

The last few times this has occurred, it was done by the 4chan /b/ group, a faction of mostly-teen hackers who like to create some commotion every now and then and often refer to themselves as "Anonymous" (which is ironic since the entire internet now pretty much knows who they are).  Lately, they have been waging a not-so-successful war on the folks over at Black Hat World.

It seems like this might be a good time to bring some of those Googlers back from Macworld to get on top of this one.

Here’s the statement Google released last time this happened:

The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.

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Technorati Tags: /b/, 4chan, Google, Google Trends, Security

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