Cloaking: Think Outside of [Your] Box
Cloaking in SEO is defined as a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser (Wikipedia). But in case of hacked sites, cloaking is more tricky than just different content for search engines and for real users. It can also be different content for different types of users. Moreover, the internal implementation is usually hidden (cloaked) from webmasters of compromised sites.
This post will be about one of such site hacks that involved SEO cloaking and used quite an interesting trick to alter page content.
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/tmp/wp_inc or Not Your Typical WordPress Attack
This post will provide a very detailed and rather technical description of the latest massive WordPress hack. I find it interesting in many ways. Mainly because it’s so atypical.
If you don’t have time to read the whole article, you can head directly to the short description of the attack and then to the Summary section where I talk about what’s new, strange and uncommon in this attack. Or if you are a webmaster of a hacked blog, go to the “To Webmasters” section – it will help you resolve the problem.
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Following the Black Hat SEO Traces
This is a follow up to my last week’s post about hacked WordPress blogs and poisoned Google Images search results. Cyber-criminals infiltrated 4,000+ self-hosted WP blogs and created doorway pages that would redirect visitors coming from Google Images search to scareware sites. A few days ago I posted a short update to let you know that Google has removed the doorway pages from its index. I also promised to share some new interesting details about that black hat SEO campaign. So here we go!
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Doorways on Non-default Ports — New Trend in Black Hat SEO?
A year ago I blogged about how hackers managed to hijack hundreds of high-profile websites to make them promote online stores that sold pirated software at about 5-10% of a real cost. They used quite a standard scheme that involved cloaking (making spammy links visible only to search engine crawlers) and conditional redirects (visitors from search engines who clicked on specifically-crafted links on compromised sites got redirected to online stores of software pirates)
Despite of all my warnings, most of those site are still hacked and help sell pirated software and steal credit card numbers. This negligence of site/server administrators encouraged cyber criminals to step even further in abusing reputation and resources of compromised servers. This post will be about one of such steps.
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Network Solutions and WordPress Security Flaw
I first noticed this hidden iframe from hxxp://networkads .net/ grep/ on April 7. It instantly drew my attention with these weird “iframe_style” scripts in Unmask Parasites reports (I even thought it was a bug in Unmask Parasites, but when I checked the infected site, I found those scripts there).
However it was a single incident and I didn’t see any obvious pattern back then. Two days later, when I noticed David’s (Sucuri Security) article about this very issue and the follow-up by Brian Krebs, I decided to take a closer look at it. What I found is quite interesting and raises a few serious questions about security of websites on shared servers.
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Spammy Links From Remote Servers
Hidden spammy links injected into web pages on legitimate websites is quite a widespread type of hacker attacks. These parasites try to suck all the “PageRank juice” out of any website they manage to break into and put their shady web pages high in search results.
There are many ways hackers can inject links. They can insert them as plain HTML (will work on most sites) or as an encrypted PHP code (the files should be processed as PHP). Hackers can even use SQL injection on database-driven sites that don’t properly sanitize user input.
Decoupling code from data
Sometimes hackers decouple code from data and inject only some PHP instructions that load spammy links from a standalone file. This makes the construction more flexible since they can simply change the content of that single file whenever they decide to promote a new set of links – no need to update every infected file on a site.
In this post, I’ll show a even more clever way of decoupling code from data.
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Tweet Week: March 8-14, 2010
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Security Lesson From a Kenyan Marathon Runner
If you have a site/blog but you are not a techie and don’t know much about website security, you might want to read this article written by a Kenyan marathon runner about how his blog was hacked.
He received an email from Google saying that his site had been temporarily removed from search index because it contained hidden spam links and thus violated Google’s guidelines.
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About this blog
Occasional posts from the developer of
Unmask Parasites about things that hackers already know and site owners should know (if they don't want to be victims).
Exploit reviews, security tips, and all that jazz.
