Matt Cutts Blog has been HACKED!
April 1st, 2007
Hi everyone – sorry for the long time between drinks 🙂 I’ve been working hard getting back into my PhD…
Matt Cutts Blog Hijacked
Just an interesting little tid-bit today. It seems that Google’s famous unofficial blogger, Matt Cutts, has had his site hijacked by a bunch of hackers calling themselves the Dark Seo Team.
It may be that the Hijack has been resolved by the time you read this, so just in case, if you click the thumbnail above, you can see what his site looked like when I visited today.
Is this a WordPress Vulnerability?
It seems that no-one, not even Matt, is immune to being hacked.I wonder whether this has anything to do with Matt’s recent upgrade to the latest version of WordPress?
I guess we will see soon enough!
Dark SEO
It’s interesting that the hack is from a mob calling themselves Dark SEO..
Interesting, I say, because I think I saw warning signs that they were planning something funky about three weeks back.
Dark SEO had Cloaked Copies of Matt Cutt’s Page Weeks Ago
How? Well I was having a brief look at my Google webmaster tools ‘links’ section back then, and I noticed that one of my pages (Damn Ugly Websites) was being linked to from a site with a fairly suspicious URL (click here to see the site). I checked out the site and pretty quickly realised they were running a cleverly cloaked copy of Matt’s Site…
What is Cloaking?
What’s Cloaking? Well, basically, if you follow the link, you’ll see it looks like an innocuous web page to us, the human reader, but it seems that if you happen to be googlebot, that site presents completely different content – a copy of Matt’s Site. The perpetrators? None other than darkseoteam.com, who have now Hijacked Matt’s Site.
I did send a message to Matt suggesting he should check it out.. I think my exact words were “Matt, I found this URL – you should probably check it out” – Wow – if it turns out that was the first stage in their hack attack, I will be feeling very prescient indeed :).
But DAMN – If they were clever enough to hack his site, surely they should have been clever enough to put some adsense units on there as well 🙂
NOTE: He got the better of me.. this was an April Fools Joke from Matt 🙂
Cheers,
theDuck
Entry Filed under: SEO Discussions
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5 Comments Add your own
1. JohnMu | April 1st, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Those pages are part of a “GoogleWashing” (302 hijack) that they did in 2005: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4091
This is something new. Interesting that it’s just right after the upgrade of WordPress… There goes the neighborhood 😀
2. JohnMu | April 1st, 2007 at 7:36 pm
This is probably the vulnerability: http://digg.com/rss/mattcutts/index2.xml
3. DuckMan | April 1st, 2007 at 7:43 pm
An April Fools Joke from the great blogger himself – SURELY NOT!!!!
4. DuckMan | April 1st, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Nah – regardless of whether it ‘appears’ that Matt has Dugg the stories about it, I do doubt that this is an April Fools joke from him. Surely he would have no-followed the link to darkseo at the bottom of the page? 😀
5. DuckMan | April 1st, 2007 at 7:52 pm
If it is an April Fools joke from him, I’m wondering about the following ‘credit’ –
U(r|d)(s|i)
It looks very much like a unix style pipe… perhaps a cryptic message?
M
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