Thanet District Council member and "IT Expert" Dr Simon Moores may be connected to promoting casual sex, gambling and hacking as well as other "Black Hat" online practices we can exclusively reveal.

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of the details I should be pointed out (if only for legal purposes) that Black Hat SEO activities might not, necessarily, be illegal. Black Hat SEO is an attempt to "game the system" in a number of different ways some of which are ethically questionable. Often this focuses on moving "page rank" from one location to a high yield secondary location to increase search ranking. Sometimes that law is broken to do this - consider the Computer Miss-use Act and comment spamming, for example - but this is not always the case.

Prepare now to enter the morally gray world of the dark side of the Internet as we follow Dr Moores public activities online. What we see, may shock you and may shock Dr Moores if he was not aware of it.

Dr Simon Moores is often one to point out his technical abilities and knowledge. He is the author of "March of the Spiders" and has a blog called "Netcrime Report". Simon also claims to have advised Microsoft, the UK Government and others on the subject of online crime (ecrime, as he puts it) and has connections to the "ecrime congress". With such a background you'd think he should know a thing or two. This, one would think, is a fine upstanding net citizen not to be trifled with.

Keep reading to find out the extent of Thanet Star's discoveries. I've kept it off the front page as some of the screen captures contain content that somepeople may find offensive. I will present the evidence in the form of screen shots along with my reactions and a little technical insight. I will leave the final conclusions to you.

As you will soon see it doesn't take a genius to turn up evidence of activity known as "Black Hat SEO" that is directly connected to Simon Moores himself. Start with any comment he has left on a Thanet Blog wile logged into blogger.com and click through to take a look at his profile. You will see that he runs more than one blog. "NetCrime" and "ArabGov.Com" are currently listed although Zentelligence (pictured and still broken more than a year after I told Simon what was wrong) and Thanet Life are also fairly well known.

Pictured below is a screen capture of Dr Simon Moores profile on blogger.com notice the two blogs he chooses to promote. It's not all of his blogs just some. This technique is, in marketing speak, called a funnel where you are offered a limited choice of exits into the material being promoted. It's all quite normal.



You will probably notice that he has a team mate for the netcrime blog.

Let's visit the NetCrime blog. (The next bit might offend).

This shot comes from: netcrimereport.blogspot.com linked to first on Dr Simon Moores profile. The screenshot was taken on 16th Arpil 2009.



That was not what I was expecting a local councillor and family man to be pushing.

The content is generated by Javascript so that what you and I see is not what Google or Yahoo see. Crafty stuff. This is pure Black Hat SEO and quite a skillfull use of it at that.

Now I should point out (if only to cover the collective backside) that there is nothing specifically illegal (as far as I know) in what Dr Simon Moores is doing. It might be morally questionable but that is all. Maybe the credit crunch has hit Dr Moores harder than we imagined.

My Reaction

I was stunned when I saw that on Simon Moores' blog.

It is well quite well established that Dr Moores is not above ignoring Wikipedia's guidelines when it suits him so perhaps he has a similar disregard for Google's and Yahoo's rules too? Has Dr Simon Moores taken to pushing gambling, casual sex and hacking? Are things so slow in the Air Ads industry that spammy blogs pay better than talking about ecrime?

When Dr Simon Moores wrote on Zentelligence last of the boundaries of the different 'hats' I wear was this a psychological slip showing the darker side of his digital life or just a coincidence? Also when Dr Simon Moores wrote, last year, that IT just was not "fun" any more and that he wanted a change of career, boy, did he seem to mean it!

Other Possibilities: "Hacker"

As near as I can tell this blog was last updated back in Feburary 2008. Has Simon fallen prey to something a little more sophisticated than greed since then?

It seems unlikely that Simon Moores, the ecrime adviser would have allowed his blog that he is promoting to stay "hacked" that long. But it is, in theory, possible.

Let's look at what would be needed to be done.

The ecriminal would need to force access to Dr Simon Moores account via a Cross Site Scripting attack, phishing or brute forcing his password. Then they would need to re-write his blog. The javascript at the bottom of the page that puts the visible content on the page seems credibly technical enough to uphold this idea.

Other than that there is no sign of any other damage. Simon's other blogs are fine, and so I find myself full of questions. It's a get out of jail free for Dr Moores realy. "yeah, I was hacked, whoops - thank you Matt for noticing"...

So why did I find additional ethically shady activities of a different nature (Black Hat SEO)

Other Possibilities: Rouge Partner

There are two people on the blogging team here. So it seems unlikely that both have failed to notice that the blog is showing some fairly dirty stuff. Perhaps Thanet's "ecrime expert" been duped by his own NetCrime blog partner, Rukshan?

Let's back up and look at Rukshan's profile(s).



This Rukshan character may or may not be another person but it is a person that sees no need to fill out their blogger profile. This happens most often with two groups - those who are not very interested and/or technically minded and spammers who can't be bothered. I'll let you, the reader, be the judge of that.

Rukshan has not listed NetCrime as a blog he/she is proud of. (Which is not surprising given the content on it currently). Let's see who this Rukshan works with...



Okay so the one log on show here is a two person blog being worked on by two acounts one of which has access to NetCrime as a co-author or partner. Let's take a look.



What a pile of junk! So the "partner" for the NetCrime blog seems to only be involved in junky, spammy, ethically dark blogs. Why would Dr Moores partner with such a person?

What could the author(s) of this pile of junk be doing? Are they fooling arround or just getting started in Black Hat activities?

It's dated 2006 so surely Simon Moores knows about it, right?

There are two links: one to www.itproportal.com for the keyword "Hyperlink" and one to a video hosted on opentext.com.

The only purpose I can see for this pile of poo is to appear to be normal content to a search engine and thus boost the search ranking of itproportal.com. For those who have an interest in real SEO will know that many search engines rank pages by not only the incoming links but the words used in that link so that if you rank well for a given word you come first when it is used in search. That's the theory anyway - now stop worrying about it because it's not a big deal - unless you are a spammer.

Dr Simon Moores, or his right hand man for NetCrime, appears to be trying to rank www.itproportal.com for the highly competitive keyword "hyperlink". Why? I don't know.

The fact is that this junk page is totally worthless for SEO. If you want to know why that is drop me an email but otherwise you can take my word for it.

So many questions about Dr Simon Moores web activity.

So many questions are raised by these findings. Not many are answered.

Did Dr Simon Moores create spammy pages for casual sex, hacking, casinos and www.itproportal.com or was the ecrime expert taken for a ride by a fairly ineffectual ecriminal?

If Dr Simon Moores is pushing ethically difficult products has this brought his office into disrepute? (Possibly not actually)

If he was bested by an ecriminal then what does that say (if indeed it says anything) about his ecrime advice?

What is going on with those weak spammy pages? Is that a failed attempt at SEO the bad way or just a pile of Junk that two people seem proud of? This part of the story makes no sense what-so-ever, even less sense when you look at how it seems set up for screen scapping when there is a perfectly healthy XML feed that'll do the job better.

Am I wrong to have expected more from Dr Simon Moores? After all he is an expert speaker on the subject of ecrime, isn't he?

I am still prepared to believe that this is all the product of confusion and misunderstanding if someone is willing to explain how this is possible. Dr Moores has campaigned extensively to promote his experience and expertise on matters relating to IT and it would be a shame (for Simon, at least) for all that reputation building to be burned to nothing. However, everything I have seen is at odds with everything that Dr Moores has said about himself.

I'll leave the conclusions to you.


Everything in this article not backed up by hard facts should be taken as opinion. All opinions are, as always, my own opinions, not yours, not anyone else's just my opinions. That said the screen shots shown are of sites connected to Dr Moores and Dr Moores is welcome to leave a message explaining what is going on so long as he keeps a civil tongue in his head.