December 22, 2007 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – The online edition of The Australian newspaper recently reported an Australian web host as being hit by a Russian black market hacking scam. The scam is designed to artificially improve a website’s ranking in key search engines. Melbourne-based MD Webhosting (http://www.mdwebhosting.com.au/)confirmed its servers were hacked and malicious code added into customers' websites.
The scam is relatively sophisticated. A series of links are added to a website’s infected pages, creating ‘link farms’. Many of the links in the link farms direct back to target websites, some run by pharmaceutical companies. This artificially increases the target website’s apparent popularity and therefore improves its ranking in search engines such as Yahoo! and Google. According to MD Webhosting, between 5 and 10 per cent of 20,000 customers were affected by the malicious code.
The online edition of The Australian newspaper reported MD Webhosting’s Business Services Manager, Mr. Tom Najda, as suggesting the company’s servers did not have proper security and its IP blocking systems and firewalls were "not up to scratch". A solution to the problem was established and implemented, but it did not stop some website owners having to take down their sites.
