Hacking problems

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  thepogg · Member · Feb 27, 2015 at 12:56 pm

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  Opening a thread…..

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  thepogg · Member · Feb 27, 2015 at 12:56 pm

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  Hi everyone,

  I’m the owner of ThePOGG.com. For the last 6 months I’ve been aware of large scale hacking of WordPress sites.

  The hacker/s are using security holes in older versions of WP and plugins associated with WP to gain access to sites and inject gambling related content onto them. There are literally thousands of site that have been hacked and have no knowledge of it. It could even run into tens of thousands.

  Here’s a perfect example;

  Greensborough College in Australia – http://greensc.vic.edu.au/

  Here’s a site search of the Greensborough College site for the word casino;

  https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:http:%2F%2Fgreensc.vic.edu.au%2F+casino

  Over 20k results – all of them highly likely to be hacked pages. I found this site because it turned up in a high value gambling term search (search terms ‘playtech casino 2015’) and it took me less than 10s of looking.

  This hack is being used to create illegal revenue, damages the quality of the sites it’s placed on and is being used to implement negative SEO – in the form of cloaked links – against legitimate competitors.

  You can read about this issue on these threads;

  http://www.gpwa.org/forum/new-hack-mo-dealt-right-221472.html#post780016
  http://www.affiliateguarddog.com/community/threads/new-hack-mo-dealt-with-right.8423/
  http://www.gpwa.org/forum/urgent-all-affiliate-programs-ban-verifiedcasinos-com-serious-hacking-proof-219035.html
  http://www.affiliateguarddog.com/community/threads/affeurope-you-are-a-part-of-serious-crime.7956/
  http://www.gpwa.org/forum/current-casino-program-hacking-luckycasinoslist-com-220865.html

  I’m not looking for anyone to take a position of sympathy for gambling affiliates and nor am I looking to fault either WP or the site affected site owners for this issue. What I am hoping can be done is for WP to issue at least a WP News feed alert, if not send out an email to their users alerting them to this issue and asking them to ensure they’ve upgraded to the latest versions of WP and any relevant Plugins.

  All the best,

  ThePOGG

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  shawnajroberts · Member · Feb 28, 2015 at 12:12 am

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  Hi there!

  Your threads are being closed automatically because they look like spam.

  Your concerns are regarding WordPress.org sites, not WordPress.com. Please do not post about this again in the WordPress.com forums. Head over to WordPress.org if you feel the need to post about this further:

  http://wordpress.org/support/

  Also, please read this about reporting security bugs:

  https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/reporting-security-vulnerabilities/