Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

Well, well, it seems that Affiliate Future are having a bad day. Trying to access their UK site currently shows you this

0wned by PSYCH@ Fucked israel

Now, before we all run off and tell the cyberpolice, lets just use a simple tool to see whats happening here. Lets start with an HTTP viewer (I like Rex Swains’ personally). There’s a couple of 302’s, but it’s just the ASP sorting itself out - nothing wrong there, as such.

Then looking through the HTML of the actual page, we find :

[a·href="main/newsdetail.asp?NewsID=1472"·class="text"][m3ta·http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://psych0path.kayyo.com/psych.txt"][/a]

It’s a newsfeed item that some bright spark has set up with a meta refresh command as a news item title. As browser software is about as clever as a bag of spanners, it just obeys the command blindly, and performs the refresh.

So, not a hack really, but an interesting use of outside content (the feed) to influence a site. You should be careful about who you give access to your site, even if it’s just implied access as in this case. Also, note that just because the refresh was to a text file, it didn’t have to be - why that refresh could have gone ANYWHERE…

Could at least have stuffed a few cookies while they were at it - amateurs