Earlier this week, we reported on a deliberate effort to hack a large number of blogs for SEO and cash – a story originally broken by Tony Hung over at Deep Jive Interests.
It appears now that this issue is more significant than what anyone originally imagined.
Tony has discovered that ZDnet appears to have been impacted. In addition, Kevin Burton who is the founder & CEO of Tailrank comments on the significant impact of what he calls a ‘blog spam epidemic’. CenterNetworks also has some coverage of the issue.
The seriousness of this blog spam epidemic became evident earlier today when Technorati announced that they would stop indexing blogs that are vulnerable due to not having upgraded or patched their wordpress installation. Their announcement reads:
Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.
Technorati warned users as far back as February 12th, 2008 of this security issue. It’s amazing that many blogs have not yet been upgraded.
