The latest research has shown that some hackers have found their way to many websites so as to leverage on these websites to perpetrate crime.
It has been revealed that there is a botnet that is run by some criminals to boost the SEO of websites owned by their clients who are into illegal businesses. They do this by inserting some links that are hidden to your site by using SQL injection.
This revelation was made by the co-founder and CTO of Imperva, Amichai Shulman in an interview he granted SC Magazine UK. He stated that these criminals are into anything illegal, from selling drugs and counterfeit goods to selling adult content. What they do is that they steal the traffic of legitimate websites and direct them to those of their criminal clients.
During the interview, Shulman made it known that his company has been able to identify over 700 host IP addresses that are used by these people through botnet to carry out their nefarious activities. These people usually launch both HTML and SQLi link injections to prey on the vulnerability of some websites. In addition to using these link injections, they equally use comment spam so as to create hidden links that will be sent back to their clients’ sites with the objective of increasing the rankings of their clients.
Also, Mr. Shulman revealed that the side effect on the victim site is that the Google ranking of the site will drastically reduce as a result of this evil manipulation by the hackers since the traffic to the hacked sites would have been subjected to manipulation and eventually diverted to other sites. Because of their need to hit many sites, they make use of a botnet. This makes their work faster and thus, will be able to reach a higher number of sites within a very short period of time.
Speaking about the contribution of the affected sites to this strike, he said that most of the site owners have allowed ignorance to make them vulnerable to cyber attacks and hacking. According to him, a lot of small companies believe that they are helpless in the face of attacks. This is based on the wrong assumption that it will take a fortune to defend themselves against cyber criminals. While it is true that hacking is a very complex threat, some little actions can go a long way in mitigating the risks of exposure to hacking and other cyber crimes. He believes that these companies have resigned to fate whereas all that they need is a small app that may not cost them more than $50 every month. With this app, you can be rest assured that you have some level of protection against hackers and their activities. Even if they are able to attack you, the effect might be minimal compared to when no security measure is put in place.
If you refuse to do anything about these attacks, the attackers may be tempted to come for a return. They may end up still your data or create more havoc than you can ever imagine. If they can divert your traffic today, they can do worse things tomorrow