The Wardman Wire

An excellent heads-up from Patrick Altoft at Blog Storm:

Every month thousands of websites get hacked into and have hidden links inserted into the pages by people wanting their spam sites to rank highly in the search engines.

And a suggestion that Google alerts can be used as an early warning system to notify you by email when there is a problem. Patrick again:

Luckily Google Alerts allows us to create advanced search queries so we can set up an alert to monitor our websites for any terms that might appear when a hacker takes control. Of course we can’t monitor every term but it is a very good starting point.

To get started we need to think of a few likely spam terms that people might like to inject in our site and then use them to make up a search query:
viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:blogstorm.co.uk

Next simply go to Google Alerts and enter the query above into the “Create a Google Alert” box and you will get an email whenever Google spots one of your chosen spam words on your site.

This search for the Wardman Wire should only give a few hits for legitimate use of the terms (at present it does). I have now set up an email alert at Google alerts to warn me if this changes.

Patrick has a more detailed walkthrough over at Blogstorm.

Having been subjected to this sort of hacking myself, and having had to deal with the consequences, I recommend that anyone and everyone should set up such an alert. It will only catch one variety of hacking, but every little helps.