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Not sure what these are but I thought I'd bring it up. Searching for a narrow topic brings up the MSU question and two clone sites with the same content. It's not clear to me what these clones are trying to accomplish; we can speculate that they are doing bait and switch (start serving malware all of a sudden) and/or SEO/click fraud operations, but off the bat, I don't see any obviously harmful.

Google screen shot, for your entertainment:

Google screen shot, for your entertainment

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  • wwwniche updated very quickly, and is now displaying this question as the newest question on the site.
    – tripleee
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 7:55
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    As per meta.stackexchange.com/questions/200177/… I am reporting this via "contact us" as well.
    – tripleee
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 7:56
  • We get quite a lot of these. Using the contact form to report the site is the correct course of action if they are not providing attribution.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 8:48
  • @Mokubai Thanks, already did. The entire sites appear to be full clones, with links to chat and what not -- thus "attribution" doesn't really enter into the picture IMHO. That also makes this a slightly different case than the one you linked to. I am rather reluctant to explore the full width of the mirroring in case the sites are malvertising fronts, but as far as I can tell, it's a complete, full mirror, just with the top-level domain changed. I can speculate that they pull down CSS, JavaScript etc from the main site behind the scenes, which I imagine will be unwelcome as well.
    – tripleee
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 8:55
  • I have seen a few of these sites myself and simply reported them as scraping. Their end goal is likely to get advertising revenue for minimal work or as you mention possible malware injection but I prefer to assume that they are merely stupid than actively malicious. Reporting to the Stack team is about all we can do in either case. Google is very likely to give us preference in any searches relevant to the subject due to our size, and a quick glance should show anyone that they are simply a scraper for other sites. The duplicate might not be precise, but it tells us what to do.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 10:05

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