6/14/2011 - Cyberbullying Report is wondering if Gregory Evans knows that his company LIGATT Security International publishes random junk as news on NationalCyberSecurity.Net as part of what appears to be an ongoing black hat search engine optimization (SEO) spamming operation. The questions arose after Cyberbullying Report was conducting a backlinks analysis in Google Webmaster Tools and noticed that several items from its RSS feed including user generated content (UGC) had been published as news on the site. Cyberbullying Report didn’t think much of this at first, but after further review realized that this was just the tip of the iceberg in what looks like a massive amount of content scrapping by a publicly traded company on a security news site set up to promote its Blog Talk Radio show National Cyber Security.
LIGATT Security International is a publicly traded company founded by CEO Gregory Evans. Evans is an interesting character who claims on his website GregoryDEvans.com to be the world’s number one hacker responsible for stealing millions of dollars before becoming a born again crime fighter and college professor. As a good PR person he knows how to get his face out there having been featured on several news channels including Fox News and CNN promoting products, but also by being an expert in his field that reporters seek out when they need an expert opinion on cyber security matters. The company itself advertises several things on its website LIGATTSecurity.com including a program for locating stolen laptops, hackers for hire, t-shirts that say "number one hacker" worn by a male model who looks like a Tool Academy reject, and National Cyber Security on Blog Talk Radio.
Content issues with National Cyber Security become obvious to anyone who first visits their Blog Talk Radio page (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/nationalcybersecurity) and reads the part of the show’s description that sounds like George W. Bush saying, "The the show is has been designed for the laymen person who may not be technical". As sad as that sounds a click on the link to NationalCyberSecurity.com leads you down a path to a website where LIGATT puts less thought into content than they did into their radio show description. NationalCyberSecurity.com is just a duplicate of the NationalCyberSecurity.net home page featuring a combination of original content created by LEGATT employees and syndicated content from other websites including CyberbullyingReport.com. The syndicated content is scrapped using auto-blogging software that posts a combination of real news and random junk as news on the site.
To demonstrate a portion of the results that make up over 65,000 pages indexed by Google take a look at the following:
1. Content written by an anonymous CyberbullyingReport.com user: http://nationalcybersecurity.net/they-are-at-it-again/
2. Article about summer outdoor fun full of affiliate links for water toys categorized as Child Safety Online: http://nationalcybersecurity.net/summer-outdoor-fun/
It should be obvious to anyone who reads the first article and clicks on the link to Cyberbullying Report that it is just the work of an anonymous author who loved capital letters and not news. The second one may pass the eye test as an article at first, but upon further inspection you can see that it is full of Amazon affiliate links surrounded by text about products that could be fun for kids in the summer. Anyone who reads it should agree that it has nothing to do with Child Safety Online as it has been categorized. There are many other examples of this kind of stuff and in each case it appears to be the scrapping of random RSS feeds as well as articles that may or may not be submitted by end users.
At first Cyberbullying Report suspected someone at the company of scrapping feed content, but after further investigation it appears that the articles or the Cyberbullying Report feed may have been added by someone outside of the company. To make sure it had no prior membership with National Cyber Security Cyberbullying Report did a search of all existing records on email accounts used by site administrators and found no record of ever receiving an email confirmation. Then Cyberbullying Report created a new account, got its password via email, and logged in. Once inside it was discovered that any article or feed could be submitted using the Wordpress "Press This" tool, but you would have to poke around a bit to find it. Cyberbullying Report then tried to submit an article, but was unsuccessful. Several attempts to navigate the site post login resulted in an inability to connect to the site. Eventually Cyberbullying Report was able to write an article, assign it to a category, and click the submit button before getting logged out. It appears that the site is either a content farm incapable of accepting content from members at the moment, a place where submission is always impossible, or someone at the company randomly finds feeds to scrap.
Conclusion
There are many autoblogs and articles submission sites out there that accept user submitted articles, but it is rare to find one owned by a company claiming to be the leader in cyber security software functioning this way. The only possible explanations for this are that the radio people are looking for an easy way to find a large amount of new content to read on the air quickly, increase revenue from Google AdSense, increase sales of products on company sites linked to it on a site wide level either from referring clicks, or an increase in organic search traffic due to link popularity. The problem with these theories are that lots of the syndicated content is not reliable enough to read on the air, autoblogs full of duplicate content frequently violate the Google AdSense Terms & Conditions, after signing up for a membership Cyberbullying Report got to see traffic levels in the members only area which is far too low to generate significant sales for products advertised, and the likelihood that Google has not identified the site as spam algorithmically is so small that links from are probably worthless.
Furthermore the site does not contain any disclaimers, user agreements, or privacy policies belonging to NationalCyberSecurity.Net. Any site that accepts UGC should have at the vary least a link in a prominent place to a page containing disclaimers clearly stating that it is not liable for UGC. Any site that lets people register for a membership should have a check box or button click agreement as well as a link in a prominent place to a contract clearly stating what a user can and cannot do on the site. To do otherwise creates huge legal liabilities for reasons that should be obvious. A Google search produced what looks like a privacy policy, but it belongs to the Durango Herald Newspaper in Colorado.
National Cyber Security Privacy Policy: http://nationalcybersecurity.net/privacy-policy/
Durango Herald Privacy Policy: http://www.durangoherald.com/section/privacypolicy/
Does Gregory Evan Know About This?
Gregory Evans probably has no clue what is really going on, a man as well known as him probably would not approve of anything that puts his company at risk of losing its AdSense account by publishing unreliable information and creating a huge legal liability. It is probably some bonehead at his company who knows or thinks he knows something about SEO, but doesn’t know squat and may consider it a way to get current news for the radio.