Bad combo: Hackers with SEO skills

SEO blogger Hamlet Batista and MSNBC.com blogger Bob Sullivan say criminals are now combining search-engine optimization (SEO) tactics and booby-trapped Web pages to systematically take over all the top spots on a search results page, thus "casting a wide net that’s more likely to catch Web users."

The hackers (at one point called “SEO gods”) can “take any site and get it on the first page of Google results,” the blog posts say. It's known as "Google poisoning."

Batista explains:

Instead of wasting energy defacing sites and showing them off as trophies to their peers on IRC, hackers are now modifying the code of hacked sites to include (invisible) links to their Web properties or link farms. The article talks about virus writers creating tens of thousands of Web sites and cross-linking them using all sorts of queries as anchor text. They then spam blog comments around the Web to improve the overall PageRank of the link farm.

Hackers already know how to break into sites. Now that they see the profit that can be made from top-ten search rankings, they have adapted their techniques to ... take advantage.

However, this is just the beginning, and I’m willing to predict that this is going to scale with cleverer hacks that are harder to detect. Most break-ins will be highly sophisticated and highly automated. They will “recruit” thousands of computers into their link-farm. If your site is one of those “recruited” without your knowledge, your site will most likely be penalized by the search engine along with the whole group.

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