15 years
Here's another example. This is a hostel's website and these links are hidden to human visitors, but not to search engines:
Has Your Hostel Website Been Hacked?
Website, Computer, and Tech Support
I've been doing a scan of hostel websites to find ones that have been hacked and I've encountered a few.
The damage from the hacking in invisible because it usually involves hidden text and links -- usually about pornography, and online pharmacies.
Here's an example from a hacked hostel website. This text is invisible to humans, but Google will see it and possibly filter out the site with the "safe search" filter. That means the hostel website could lose a lot of traffic and bookings:
I'm going to email the hostels now, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to mail them all.
If you want to check if your website has been hacked, click on this link and replace example.com with your domain name:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aexample.com+porn+OR+viagra+OR+pharmacy+OR+casino&num=100
Change example.com to your domain name and click search:
- Comments
15 years
Good advice, thanks.
I tried it for yhplakias.com. The answer told me nothing! Does this mean the site is clean?
15 years
I tried it for yhplakias.com. The answer told me nothing! Does this mean the site is clean?
I just double-checked and it's clean.
If your site were affected, it would look something like this:
The site above is a travel portal that was hacked.
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15 years
One other thing I forgot to mention was that it's a good idea to backup the hostel's website regularly just in case this happens.
If the site doesn't change, regular backups aren't necessary. If the site changes regularly (like this one) it's good to backup often.
It's a very common attack.
I posted more about website security in the Members Chat section [once you make 50 posts in the forum the Members Chat section becomes accessible -- this is to encourage forum participation].
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