What Should I Do To This Person?

In my opinion I think you need to take his ass out! From what I understand this is a well known/respected seo firm in Denver who claims to take an "ethical approach". Spamming links is one thing, but link injection is something totally different and he should be called out on it.

Just let it go for now. If he does it again, you can take legal action and dont put the law into your hands.

Inject all the backlinks back into your site.Then email these clients with threat of legal action.

Mail to them link to NYT article on the penalty given to overstock by google for illegal/blackhat links.

Pretend yourself to be a whitehat SEO guru guy and convince them to be your clients.
Sign them up and outsource the SEO.

Make more sites with these vulnerabilities. Get More clients.

Rinse and Repeat.

phpbuilt said:

If someone wants to take over SEO clients from another company, I can't think of a better way of doing it than to take a list of his clients and illegally hacking/injecting those clients into other people's websites and having the hacked people complain to the advertisers. They'll drop their first SEO guy instantly. Then the competitor comes in and woos them to use them instead.

So maybe by complaining to these companies, you're doing exactly what some hacker SEO guy wants you to do -- you do all the dirty work of destroying the client relationships for him.

Just saying that is a possibility...

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The above is the only thing stopping me from poisoning his business. My question, however, is how would a competitor get a list his his clients? It seems to me more likely that this is not the work of a competitor because the affected article is buried deep in the inner pages of my site like he was trying to hide the links from me. But I routinely check all my articles if they were personally written by me.

BENNY8877 said:

If it bothers you that much I would send his customers an email/letter stating that you are suing them or something like that because of the way that they are conducting their SEO activities. They will get freaked out and probably fire the guy.

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This is the best idea.

what do you mean by "cracked my WP password" ?
Change it nad see if any problems with your hosting

Looks like he's not that bad,because he might change the password,just secure your password and upgrade it,then do something about his biz,he doesn't fancy good things for others,do likewise to him.

I agree with sending his customers notices. He obviously is aware of what he is doing. Its not like this guy is accidentally injecting your pages.

call her/his another client and tell the sh^t that he/she made..

It's still only day 2, so I haven't done anything yet but I'm still thinking real hard about it. There's no telling how many other sites he's done this to. I don't want to be a punisher cos I do blackhat stuff but I don't (as a rule) hack people's sites.

BlackhatBigfoot said:

It's still only day 2, so I haven't done anything yet but I'm still thinking real hard about it. There's no telling how many other sites he's done this to. I don't want to be a punisher cos I do blackhat stuff but I don't (as a rule) hack people's sites.

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I agree completely. I have had such stuff in the past but it happened to nearly all WP sites in the same hosting. Though the host did not admit but it seemed it was due to the hosting database server being hacked through which they were injecting. Screw him up for sure but also make sure to harden the server if it is your own or to tell your host if it is on shared/reseller etc. And always keep backups and I also learned it the hard way after the server got hacked.

Grab his clients' information, send a porn backlinks to their links, and send them an email said that their SEO company did a very bad work for them (such as hijacking your site, and creating porn backlinks ). Then in the end of the conversation, offer your SEO service.

I received a PM from someone offering help(will not give out your username). Thanks but when I replied you your box is full.

Nothing.

Revenge doesn't really accomplish great things. But if you choose this path, then be certain to yourself how far you are willing to go. This is because it is highly possible that he will retaliate as well, considering he already knows how to peer into your existing security then this is a big risk on your part.

What you should do instead?

Determine how he was able to do what he did on your site. If the site was hosted on a shared hosting then consider making a check on other sites (yours or not) if they also suffer similar situation. I suffered a deface situation on one of my main website before and after a thorough investigation, I noticed that other people's sites that was hosted on a shared host was affected as well.

If the site resides on a shared host, consider moving it to a different host.
If the site resides on your own dedicated host, coordinate with your hosting company about the upgrade on its security.

Check your theme. See if there are any encoded sections. It is a way for hackers to inject their code, letting them inside your site.

Do this as well on any plugins. Make sure that you only use or download them from official sites.

Don't forget to coordinate with your hosting company. They usually employ professionals and this will give you access to a specialist for free. Let them know of the situation. They know how to peer into the server's log.

Think about it.

This situation gives you the opportunity to further strengthen your existing security.


Learn something about it and grow. =)

AT BlackhatBigfoot

maybe you should just send him a pic of your avatar. LOL


Funny avatar man.

BlackhatBigfoot said:

Thanks guys for all the useful comments. I really would like to forget about it but these links are not like blog comments. Imagine your well-written article littered with thirty different links to sites like "IKEA Denver" to "how to pass a urine test," in the process of which your article's formatting is all f'ked up and you have to first remove the links then try to remember how you had it formatted (e.g. paragraphs,bold,h2,h3 etc.). I would have given him some links if he'd just commented but no...he wanted to be a smart*ss. And this is the second time it's happened (it's better secured now).

Fair is fair. He's probably a member here so I 'll give him three (3) days to find this thread (if he doesn't, oh well) and apologize or I'm sending nasty legal notices to all his clients.

Just so there will be no mistake who I'm talking about, I'll list a few of his clients here.

hxxp://www.discountedlandscape.com/
hxxp://www.diamondbrokerdenver.com/
hxxp://www.miragela.com/
hxxps://profiles.google.com/marysharpbeaufort#marysharpbeaufort/about
hxxp://www.aspendistribution.com/

I got plenty more but these should be sufficient to identify to the guy that he (or she) is the one. It takes me less time to send out e-mails than it did to clean up my site.

Unless someone has a really good reason why I shouldn't do this, it's on!

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Why not simply let his clients know what he is doing and warn THEM?

blackhataffiliate said:

In my opinion I think you need to take his ass out! From what I understand this is a well known/respected seo firm in Denver who claims to take an "ethical approach". Spamming links is one thing, but link injection is something totally different and he should be called out on it.

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If someone called my clients and claimed anything bad and I lost them, I 'd sue him to death. So, be careful.

You (the OP) used nulled software that was backdoored, the person who backdoored and distributed it sells link, you got screwed. Next time, buy your software Revenge is always nice and I approve it, but don't go for it if you can't face the counterstrikes. Or do you think you 'll just waltz around like an invincible destroyer?

jazzc said:

If someone called my clients and claimed anything bad and I lost them, I 'd sue him to death. So, be careful.

You (the OP) used nulled software that was backdoored, the person who backdoored and distributed it sells link, you got screwed. Next time, buy your software Revenge is always nice and I approve it, but don't go for it if you can't face the counterstrikes. Or do you think you 'll just waltz around like an invincible destroyer?

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My army of deathstarts will make me master of orion! (oh man that game is sooo old... and great)

kirkonpolttaja said:

My army of deathstarts will make me master of orion! (oh man that game is sooo old... and great)

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Indeed it 's old Got to play it someday

jazzc said:

If someone called my clients and claimed anything bad and I lost them, I 'd sue him to death. So, be careful.

You (the OP) used nulled software that was backdoored, the person who backdoored and distributed it sells link, you got screwed. Next time, buy your software Revenge is always nice and I approve it, but don't go for it if you can't face the counterstrikes. Or do you think you 'll just waltz around like an invincible destroyer?

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Certainly this is something also that I have to consider, being sued. But I don't have to accuse anyone if I contact the people whose website urls appeared illegally in the content of my site. If these people have contracted with someone for SEO services, they would automatically know that something is not being done properly by their hired SEO consultant. I have every right to complain to these persons because I am the injured party.

Most likely, they will do the punishing by firing the consultant. I don't even have to reveal the name of my site if all I want to do is warn them. Further, I can't see how these injections could be the work of a competitor unless it were that he is a disgruntled former employee who took a list of clients when he left. I think this scenario therefore is unlikely.

Rather, I think the injected links will ultimately lead back to the hired SEO consultant. If that consultant out-sourced the work and others are responsible, I still think the primary party is responsible as well for the actions of sub-contractors, and last I heard, sh*t still flows down-hill.

I thank people here for their offers of help and all the great advice. I don't really like to take vengeance. I realize that the guilty party is, or considers himself a blackhatter, so I don't want to seem hypocritical when I talk about getting back at the guy. But his methods fly in the face of my idea of blackhat, which is that I don't go past the point of legality. Hacking another person's site is illegal and therefore criminal. This is why I am still not willing at this point to just let it go without giving the guy some sort of penalty thereby helping to preserve the good name of blackhat from the tarnish of criminal activity.

Today is day 3