Google Blogger exposing users to scammers. Reason not to use apps like Blogpress to post articles and photos to blogs.

These blogs use Google's Blogger. At one stage I decide to use an app to post articles to the blogs. Everything worked well.

For a while I've noticed images from old posts to be missing. Not good I thought. Perhaps Google's killed off another service I'm not aware of. But today things became a little more sinister. For some reason I decided to click on the missing photo to see what site it used. Much to my surprise it went to a scam site. As you can appreciate the last thing I want is for people going to my blog to be exposed to scammers.

So what's happening.

Some years ago I used an iPhone 4. I installed an app called Blogpress from the Apple store. Apple are very good in blocking scammers. So no problem there. However fast forward a few years and you can see how an app that no longer exists can be used by scammers.

What I didn't know was at the Blogpress stored photos on their own site and then my post provided a link to the Blogpress site. Blogpress has now died and gone. The photo in my post has now gone but the link is still there. The domain has now been taken over by someone else for nefarious activities. Even a search in Google for Blogpress returns a link to this site now owned by someone else. The site simply presents Google ads.

Clicking on the link in Google search results opened the following among others.

Therein lies the problem. The domain the third-party app Blogpress used and the live links in my blogs has now moved into other hands and is being used for completely different reasons. No way to report the issue to Google (as there's no real way to contact them easily) and the site uses Google's AdSense service so Google is even helping scammers make money.

Google should provide the ability to report nefarious sites people find in the Google search results. That would mean at least we can easily let Google know.

Now if like me you've found yourself in this situation, you need to go through your blogs and delete any reference to Blogpress. If you have thousands of posts this could be tedious to find every one.

To make my life a little easier this is what I did.

Export the blog using Back up content

Open the blog using Notepad

Search for src='http://photo.blogpressapp

In my case there were 14 entries.

Now for each entry you can find text that you can search for in Blogger and then delete the image. Not ideal as it takes time, but at least you have an approach.

NOTE: Weirdly some of the posts in the backup could not be found in live posts. That means some of the posts are not up for some reason in Blogger. That's a concern.

As for your images, they've most likely long gone. That's a problem with having your images hosted by another organisation. All is good whilst it is working, but always keep in mind you don't know what the future hold for the hosting company. We've seen companies like Microsoft dump hundreds of millions of users (Windows XP) as part of their business direction. Twenty million for their blogging software. If things aren't working for a company they need to close direction. Many fail and close down.

Lesson learned. Even with the experience and knowledge I have in IT, I'd not seen this before. I continue to learn which makes IT interesting. For some time it has been my desire to write my own blog software so I can incorporate posts directly in my site. Perhaps this is the bump I need.

Kelvin Eldridge

www.OnlineConnections.com.au