Search Engine Stuffing Defacement

This morning I got a very nice Email from Gavin Ayre about my most recent article. But then he asked me whether I had gone into business selling Viagra. What?

The following crap had been added to my main index.html page:

<div style="overflow:auto; visibility:hidden; height: 1px; ">
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<a href="http://boston-charles-hotel.com/boston-hotel.htm">online . buy</a>|
<a href="http://brasarte.com/search.php3">buy . online</a>|
<a href="http://captoninc.com/resellers051206.php">brand name .</a>|
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<a href="http://exumguides.com/thanks3.html">. tablet</a>|
<a href="http://greenkid.com/config_log.php">low price .</a>|
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...etc...

Very sneaky, those hacker punk rat bastard weasel spammers! I still don't know how it got there, but if Gavin hadn't noticed it, I would have gotten a warning from Dreamweaver next time I synchronized my site.

It looks like the scammers are trying to boost their search engine scores by being linked on lots of pages, and they're doing it stealthily. I guess this illustrates how hacking has changed in the last 10 years. If this were 1997, someone getting into my site would have posted some snarky "greetz" to his "leet" playmates, and hopped up and down on the various security mailing lists that they had managed to penetrate my site.(1) Nowadays the true colors of the hackers are a bit more obvious: they're willing to help the merchants of, well, anything, for a buck. The less technically astute con-artists were stuck sending 411 fraud Emails but with the profusion of "How to hack like a l33t w8nker!" books on the shelves, this was inevitable.

mjr.
Bellwether Farm, where it's ice-storming
Jan 7, 2007


(1) I host my site at lunarpages.com - a great hosting service - because I get a tremendous amount of image traffic to my photography gallery. I don't even know what operating system my site runs on, nor do I care. I don't want to care and for $9/month I don't have to care.