Beware of “New Owner” in Google Search Console Verifications : eAskme |
Back to the point, Internet security company Sucuri published warning for site owners that there can be malicious “new owner” Google Search Console verifications for their sites.
See : Confirmation of issue with Google Search Console for Indexed pages
Sucuri clearly said that they have observed a trend where black-hat SEO individuals or companies are trying to verify additional accounts in Google Search Console as owners of the sites they have hacked.
Attackers trying to verify themselves as owners of those hacked sites because this provide them information which Google send to website owners. Sucuri suggests that that there may be following reasons why these black hat SEOs are trying to verify themselves as owner in Google search console.
- To submit sitemaps which have spammy new pages.
- To know how well black-hat seo is doing.
- To view notifications sent by Google.
- To unverify the accounts of actual owners of website.
If your site been hacked and hacker try to add themselves as owner of your website, then you will receive notification email. This will help you to know the issues same time.
Sucuri explains that It is really easy for a verified site owner to un-verify others. There are chances where hackers can verify even more than 100 owners for same site. To save yourself you just need to remove files added by hackers during verification process.
You can remove HTML file uploaded by hackers which they have used to verify ownership of website in Google search console.
So I strongly suggests you to keep your eyes open and check every single notification from Google that you receive in your email.