Since its inception in 1996, Alexa has positioned itself as primary Web metrics data portal, empowering Web masters, potential investors, and marketers with access to free analytics based on data gathered from toolbars installed on millions of PCs across the world. Successfully establishing itself as the most popular, publicly accessible Web site performance benchmarking tool, throughout the years, the Alexa PageRank has acted as a key indicator for the measurement of a Web site’s popularity, growth and overall performance, often used in presentations, competitive intelligence campaigns, and comparative reviews measuring the performance/popularity of particular Web sites.
Operating in a world dominated by millions of malware-infected hosts, converted to Socks4/Socks5 for, both, integration within automatic account registration tools, DoS tools, in between acting as anonymization ‘stepping-stones’, cybercriminals continue utilizing this legitimate, clean IPs-based infrastructure for purely malicious and fraudulent purposes. Their latest target? Utilizing the never-ending supply of malware-infected hosts to influence Alexa’s PageRank system. A newly released, commercially available, DIY tool is pitching itself as being capable of boosting a given domain/list of domains on Alexa’s PageRank, relying on the syndication of Socks4/Socks5 malware-infected/compromised hosts through a popular Russian service.