Online spammers and hackers have little sympathy for the beautiful WordPress website you may have spent months and hours building. When it comes to blackhat SEO tactics, these spammers leave no website unturned to exploit them for their own financial gain. One common hack that WordPress websites face is known as the Pharma Hack, where hackers will replace website keywords and metadata and populate these fields with spam for pharmaceutical drugs. This invasive hack can cause more than just headaches for your webmaster; the Pharma Hack can affect the very integrity of your WordPress website.
- Misleading Search Results - Since Google pulls your website’s information from your meta tags, if they’ve been filled with keywords about where to buy drugs in Canada, it’s going to affect how your website appears in Google searches. The pages and content that appear below your main site’s search result will look vastly different than what you intended them to be, with titles, headers and keywords replaced with spam.
- Google Warnings - The Pharma Hack is annoying because it doesn’t change any of your existing content; it merely inserts itself into your metadata, which Google relies on to index your website. When Google sees that your metadata is stuffed with spam keywords, it adds a “This site may be compromised” warning to your website in Google searches. This warning is hardly a way to instill confidence from new visitors and will most certainly encourage them to click somewhere else.
- Unsecured Backdoors - One of the reasons the Pharma Hack is so pervasive is that it thrives on unsecured backdoor entry into your website. This hack is particularly pervasive on self-hosted WordPress sites, where you can have multiple points of entry based on the number and security level of each user. Hackers will continue to exploit these backdoors, either through your WordPress users, your host C-Panel, or even through your FTP credentials.
- Hidden Malicious Code - The Pharma Hack inserts itself in clever, crafty ways, by masking itself as a standard or core PHP file, often within WordPress plugin directories. This makes the task of cleaning the hack tricky for webmasters, as deleting an actual core file can make your website inaccessible.
The Pharma Hack isn’t going away and it’s important for developers to protect their websites and lock them down as tightly as possible. You can strengthen the security of your site by regularly performing updates and backups, as well as limiting the number of people with administrative or super-admin access to your Dashboard. And if the Pharma Hack hits: be ready to call in the troops to help purge your WordPress website of this nasty spam.
Author Bio:
Kate Croston is a freelance writer, holds a bachelors degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. She writes guest posts for different sites and loves contributing Home Internet Service related topics. You can get in touch with Kate HERE
