I started to look for backlinks of some turkish websites, and discovered that most of pirate turkish movie websites have backlinks from .edu, .gov, websites from US. After looking for those links, I saw that the websites are somehow hacked and with css display:none command are links hidden. Then I started to look every source code of .edu websites and saw that 50-60% of them have hidden backlinks to several websites from Turkey, India etc. For example, just look to the end of source code of http://www.webb-institute.edu and then look to backlinks of - for example www.bolumizleyin.com. I wrote to website owners and Google, but no responce. Please Matt Cutt, if your read this do something about those hacklinks.
Blackhat spammers will do almost anything to earn money, including illegal stuff like hacking tons of websites. Google is able to detect and disregard the vast majority of hacked links; you're looking at raw links but you don't see which of those links we trust and how much weight we give them.<p>We try to go a little further and warn many websites that they've been hacked, but there's definitely a lot of unpatched web servers out there, as you could guess from <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277514" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277514</a> a few hours ago.
Here's the problem... Turkey has a lot of underutilized developer talent. There's tremendous potential there, but most of it ends up in Germany or France. It also ends up in underhanded schemes.<p>For those that stay, the IT culture seems rather conservative and moving jobs is culturally difficult. The talent is there (like it is in Russia) but they are a long way off from being an innovation capitol.
That's wild. I guess since it's not exactly malicious hacking, the site owners never realize it. I know plenty of .edu websites that are terribly coded in terms of security. It's good that you reported it. Hopefully Matt sees this.
I have a site using modx.com's latest version that is continually hit with these "display:none" links. I've changed all passwords about a dozen times with no luck. Anyone have any thoughts on how to prevent this hack from continually happening?
Just checked and the university I work for has a few spam links.<p>I figure the hundreds of independently maintained public facing servers make universities particularly vulnerable.
about 18 months ago you use to see a lot of craigslist ads for access to edu sites..<p>18 months later no ads whatsoever..so it must have all been outsourced to places like Turkey etc..