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Yale and Other .edu Sites Are Targeted By Hijackers
By Shalom Issenberg | December 15, 2008
University and .edu sites are the biggest victims of spam and hijacking attempts. Webmasters who manage PHP directories, forums, and scripts understand the threats better than anyone.
Recently I had one of my own site hijacked by a viagra spammer that literally forced me to take a fully populated directory offline. In all fairness, the site was poorly scripted, and virtually ignored, otherwise it probably could have been fixed easily, although still very frustrating. The spammer populated the directory categories with fake listings that redirected the entire category pages to other spam sites (all through automated scripting – creating thousands of redirects).
If you browse .edu sites looking for link opportunities, you will have come across a lot of closed forums and guestbooks that have fallen victim to spam. Most of the time .edu webmasters will close the forum or internal security will prevent scripts from being exploited further by simply removing the ability to post to forms.
I recently noticed that a huge number of hijacked .edu sites including Yale University, are showing up in Yahoo SERPs. The hijacking involves a spamming script which exploits forums, creating redirects to MFA (made for Adsense) pages. If you look closely you can see that the pages are all the same but utilize different Adsense publisher accounts.
It’s easy to find .edu sites that have been exploited by searching for footprints of Adsense codes.
Click here to see what I’m talking about.
It’s weird that most universities aren’t “slick” enough to prevent this type of exploit. I do realize that the management of .edu site folders and subdomains are typically not centralized, but monitoring and preventing this type of malicious activity is not that difficult and should be done by someone (maybe a first year computer sciences major).
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