This is the second article about the hacker attack against osCommerce-powered sites. In the first part, you can find the description of the attack along with detection and clean-up instructions. Now I want to show you what exactly hackers did and how they managed to poison Google search results.
The main goal is to demystify hackers and encourage webmasters to explore their own sites. The more you know about hackers, the better you’ll be at protecting your site against their attacks.
This post is based on the files and access logs of three compromised sites that I received from a webmaster who contacted me a couple of weeks ago.
About a week ago I received a very insightful email from one webmaster where he described a recent attack that his site was subject to and showed how Google’s Webmaster Tools helped him notice the hack.