Site Attacked - PR Dimished

[mosley700]

I have a site which employs no smappy tactics. Earlier this year we evidently pissed off somebody. We've been getting virus mail everyday, about 30 per day. And hate mail on top of that. I first noticed that somebody was trying to get an admin password issued to a certain email address. I wrote to the email address saying, "You'll have to do better than that". The hack obliged and the site was brought down for three days, the forum was hacked, and newsletter subscribers got a bogus newsletter with virus attached.
If this was all, I'd be lucky.
Turns out we were getting quite a bit of traffic from lol*** pages which we set up directing thousands of visitors to vist my site for child porn. My site is about home improvement, so whenever I found these pages in my stats I reported them to the host. Most were on geocities, but some were on other free hosting sites.
The G dance starts and ends, and I'm left with a PR6, down from PR7.
I look at backwards links, and many of the lolita pages were cached. I believe this to be the cause of my lowered PR. Has anyone else experienced this?
Does this mean that if you want to bring a competitor's PR down, just link a bunch of kiddie p*** pages to their site?

[edited by: mosley700 at 12:44 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2002]

[lazyz]

Google says they have a lot of protection against that sort of thing but for the sake of these forums and to prevent any bot from picking up those particular words, edit your post and get rid of that P*rn and K*ddie word...

[jdMorgan]

It may mean that your efforts to eliminate the incoming links from all those sites paid off. It might also mean that some of your legitimate incoming links disappeared, due to the actions of your antagonist.

Have you found any common denominators in the tracking you've done? If you can back-track IP addresses (like the one that was used to hack your site) to a single owner, you may have a cause of action against that owner or company. You have an e-mail address... Does it contain a legitimate registered domain name? Likely suspects will be those whose sites you have displaced in the SERPs, so that may help narrow it down.

You should ask for help from your hosting service to identify the hacker who took your site down... That is big-time illegal. If they won't help and have not corrected the security hole that the hacker exploited, then it's time to change hosts.

Google has repeatedly stated that incoming links can't hurt you. Outgoing links to bad neighborhoods can kill you. Since this isn't the case here, don't worry about that.

Jim

[mosley700]

The hackers IP was a free earthlink account. Makes me think all free hosting and free dial-ups should be banned. My isp is AT & T broadband, and it never changes, so if I tried to hack somebody's site they'd be on me in a second.