Site got hacked
One of my personal sites was hacked last week and thanks to a tip off I am in the process of fixing it. The hacker somehow edited a static footer.php file (the site doesn’t run any kind or blog or WordPress software so I assume he got in via ftp) and inserted a 1 pixel gif image linking to dailymobiles.com.
Google has clearly been tipped off and the site is deindexed but 1.6 million people are linking to it.
This sort of thing is going to become more and more widespread in 2008.
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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 8 comments below, or add your own!
If you have the ability to spread so much links, why on earth do you want to spam sitewide links everywhere? I mean, how hard is it to change the number of links.
Instead of sitewide links in the footer, I rather have 1 link from a popular post on the site
LOL. 1.6m backlinks.
That was sure to go unnoticed! *rolls eyes*
If he’d kept it under the radar then he might have got away with it. Maybe, 10,000 backlinks at the most…
I found one of these links in my footer.php file a few weeks ago too! What are you doing to protect against anything like that in the future?
I only found it once my rankings dropped and then I realised I was also the victim of a much worse hack where they added about 100 hidden dodgy links at the bottom of the page!
To be honest I have just changed the ftp password, I can’t see that they got in anywhere else.
If the site used a CMS or something then I would look for holes but in this case they just edited a static file so I assume they got my password somehow.
Yeah that’s what my host told me to do but then how did they manage to get enough FTP passwords to get all those links! My password wasn’t anything that would have been found by a dictionary search etc
Mine wasn’t guessable either, it was a random word & number. Beats me, just glad I don’t code sites for big companies.
No matter how careful a developer is, there are always security holes. As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. It is sad, but true.
I recently discovered the following links throughout thousands of webpages on my site and the customer which I am hosting.
I can see the hacker initiated the hack on 09/09/08 how can he access so many files and insert such a rediculous script so quickly?
It’s taking us weeks to get all the hidden scripts out.
what are your suggestions?
there seems to be another re-direct script also: rogercombs.com what rubbish and how can this happen? My reasoning is the hosting companies are cashing on a quick buck by secretly selling private and sensitive ftp user data.
You can never know. when you call tech-support and a rep who s n India (Respectively) working for 2-rupies information of these sorts can go to the highest bidder.