Spammers Hack Al Gore's Site & Manipulate SERPs

[engine]

Al Gore's Climate Crisis website has been hacked by spammers using an interesting technique to affect Google's rankings.

Hackers inserted links into the source code of the web pages of Gore's site.

These links were not visible to regular users as they were buried in the source code, but they were picked up by search engine software to affect the position of another site altogether.

Spammers Hack Al Gore's Site & Manipulate SERPs [vnu.co.uk]

[tedster]

I guess this is news because it affected a prominent website, but I wonder if it was intentionally chosen - seems to me like parasite hosting attacks are pretty much automated and done in bulk these days.

[engine]

I guessed too it's being reported as it's prominent.

The real issue is for Google to resolve it.

[potentialgeek]

"So far, the only visible damage is for the administrators of the servers with the hacked WordPress."

Is this issue mostly/only a WordPress security flaw? I mean the scheme target, not just Al's site.

p/g

[NickDalton]

This type of attack is most likely automated. The reason climatecrisis.net was attacked is probably purely based in its high PageRank.

Many other sites have been compromised in the same way with spam links pointing back to the same site. All of the compromised sites I've seen run older versions of WordPress. So it appears that the attack is exploiting and old security flaw in WordPress.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:35 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]