101 Articles Wordpress Hacking Link Injection
WORD PRESS HACKING AND LINK INJECTION
Word Press is nothing but an open source blog tool and a publishing platform driven by PHP server side scripting language and MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS). Word press is usually customized into Content Management System (CMS). It includes plug-in architecture and a template system feature which makes it even more popular CMS on the internet and thus preferred by several websites.
Why Word Press is very popular?
Word Press is very popular because of its features and usability. Almost every website owner, SEO's and web developing companies make use of Word Press for their websites. As it is open source software it is allowed to be used free of cost and essentially every web related organizations make at most use of the software. It can be used on any kind of personal or commercial website without having to pay a single dime for it.
Technically speaking Word Press is very simple to understand, learn and to be used. It is highly user friendly and you need not be experienced to handle Word Press. It makes adding contents and articles to your websites pretty much easier than usual and the administration and navigational parts of the software is also pretty easy to understand that any tom, dick and harry could easily get used to it.
Word Press is highly popular for its features such as
1. Themes Support. You will never run out of options for themes.
2. Plug-ins extended facilities. Every plug-in can be installed nowadays within a jiffy. And finding the relevant plug-in for your requirement has also been made easy by popular search engines.
3. It follows all Web Standards and thus keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules and regulations required for running a website.
4. It is highly SEO friendly. It makes websites search engine friendly and search engine optimization is a very important factor that ought to be pursued by every single website for its betterment. It is all the more important for SEO's to stick to the concept or policy. Word Press essentially uses different functions that allow it to be search engine friendly and thus makes the job of an SEO company much easier.
5. It has a large Community Support. Community support plays a very critical factor in the development of a website. It is what that makes a website's reputation. The more inward traffic, the more popular the website becomes and subsequently ranked higher by search engine rank algorithms. Because of the large community it is also easier to find solutions for your Word Press problems as there are many forums and blogs essentially dedicated to the betterment of the software and the large community backups the development of the software as well.
Because of the above mentioned features and the large community support which is understandable because of the way it functions, Word Press is highly popular among several websites and thus preferred by every SEO's, website owners and other web development companies.
Why and how does Word Press gets exploited by Spammers?
Link building is one among the factors that influence search engine rank algorithms. Most of the websites are ranked higher based on the traffic it attracts. Also these backlinks enables identifying of websites much easier. Spiders and crawlers employed by search engines crawl through these backlinks to identify and index websites. Word Press because of its popularity and other extended functionality makes maintenance of a website pretty much easier than usual. It incorporates flexibility for every website and thus maintenance becomes much easier. Because of the establishment of links every website is invariably interconnected.
Word Press is excellently coded so that they are optimized and coded properly to benefit search engine optimization. Because of the exposure created search engines can index very easily. By participating on social aspects such as blogging, commenting, market our website through good SEO firm and other means we expose our website further which makes it all the more easily identifiable and available for several million web users. Depending upon the quality of the website, its maintenance and regular updates and its ability to gain more inward traffic, search engines index them and generate a website rank for the website which regulates depending upon your website's popularity. The number of backlinks to your site essentially influences the ranking methodology. And the more of it, is the better for your website.
These backlinks can be created by several methods such as article marketing, Web 2.0 Forum registration, Blog Commenting. Blog Commenting are the simplest means of creating backlinks for one's websites and many people do indulge in that for the betterment of their website. They basically add a comment consisting of a web address and the website owner's name which is usually a keyword. This is how spam starts to enter into our blogs.
As blogging induced socializing blogging as become very popular and several million web users take part in the activity. Word Press has become very powerful as it allows people to comment on other sites which allow human engagement. The comments in Word Press are categorized as Approved, Pending, Spam and Trash. Though Word Press has several built in method to minimize spam's it is not very effective. The spam folder category is essential there to filter spammers and all you need to do is fill the folder with spammer's usernames or IP addresses in the filter. This way to handle spammers is somewhat fine, but you can never catch all the IP addresses used by a spammer. Spammers make use of proxy servers to switch IP addresses and post countless comments. This helps them to avoid spam filters.
Spammers and hackers essentially use proxy servers and different unauthorized usernames and accounts to post several comments on blog and Word Press do not have the means to identify all of them. This is primarily because of the fact that by making all IP addresses as spam and putting them in the filter even legitimate comments will get affected which Word Press software essentially cannot do. By doing so, it also becomes useless and meaningless as it loses the power to allow human engagement and socializing which is the basic essence of Word Press.
Also the same spammers introduce exploitable code in the form of backdoor to some download of Word Press 2.1.1 version which makes the software all the more vulnerable. Even if a newer version is being launched in the future, these hackers and spammers have the ability to do the same for the newer versions as well.
Link Injection:
Spammers engage in link injection for obtaining backlinks for their websites. All they do is inject links of their website into the signature of the forum post. These posts are completely irrelevant and mindless and as an expert I have come across several comments of such mindlessness across several blogs and forums. And if the forum was popular enough it increased its SERP a bit.
Search engines became aware of such practices to influence search engine rank algorithms by showing sufficient backlinks to spammer's websites and they started to follow "nofollow" attribute. Search engines started disregarding all outgoing links as means to influence ranking methodology.
So now spammers make use of the known vulnerabilities in websites such as cross-site scripting and SQL injections and now the same links could be posted in several websites but in a masked form enabled by the features of CSS. If a site relied on third party software and themes it became more vulnerable than the rest. The add-ons were not tested to the extent of the application on which they run and thus there were several loop holes for the spammers to exploit. Thus websites and blogs were loaded with spam links to affiliate links and bogus backlinks to spammer's websites.
This helped in increasing the spammer's website rankings and bank balance. Also in the process the owners of the victimized websites or blog accounts found their website ranking to be slipping due to the promotion of illegal website's services and products.
This is the headache faced by several website owners, SEO firms and other website developing organizations. Every genuine website invariably got affected as the search engines in the name of optimization were being exploited and 6 out of the top 10 result sets were spammer's websites. Word Press and Link Injection are closely related. Spammers make use of Word Press Blogs to create backlinks to his/her websites and influence the large socializing community enabled by Word Press features by tricking them to visit his/her websites, deriving more and more traffic to their websites and influencing the search engine's ranking algorithms.
As a result, all the genuine websites fall behind spammer's websites ranking wise and they lose the opportunity to be listed among the top 10 of the search result sets. This is the biggest headache of every SEO firms, Web development organizations, website owners etc. Also the quality of the search engine result sets is drastically affected. People seek for quality information and products while they use search engines and most of the spammer's websites contain no genuine information at all. Those websites are created just to derive traffic, influence search engines and develop business without providing any service at all. Thus they are websites of no useful contents which amalgamates the search engines efficiency and people will get annoyed and avoid using search engines there onwards.
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Images |
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Screen Shots |
This image is an example of link injection attack on a Wordpress site. The spammy links that infected the site are also mentioned. These links are hidden in the code in order to manipulate the search engine rankings.
The screenshot portrays a problem that a site owner faces, due to spam link injection in the Wordpress site. It is also observed that when ever the user changes the theme, the injected spam links still seem to appear in the code. This is an example of hacking and link injection spam.
Example of link injection spam
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Source Code |
The source code is an example of spammy links that are injected in the Wordpress sites in order to spam the website and obtain high ranking for these spammy sites.
Domain Names
These domain names are examples of spam links that are related to pharmacy products and are often injected by spammers in high PR websites in order to manipulate search engine rankings.
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Working Examples |
These screen shots are an extract from a website that shows a working example of spammy link injection in Wordpress site.
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |