Hung Truong: The Blog!

Pharma Hacked!

June 21, 2012 | 0 Minute Read

I noticed that the Google results for my blog have been showing ads for pharmaceuticals. I am not actively trying to sell drugs, so I figured this was a hack.

I ended up nuking the wp directory for this blog and re-installing plugins/images. I think the site’s clean now but it’s hard to tell since the “fetch as Googlebot” feature in Google Webmaster tools seems to show stale data. I’m not sure whether to blame Cloudflare, Google or myself.

Hopefully my Google results for this blog clear up in a few days or so. The weird part of the hack is that normal visitors are not affected. So the malware writers are apparently trying to sell stuff to Google. Of course, they’re just trying to raise their Google rank by inserting links and not being caught by being too obvious. But it’s interesting that the hack is transparent to normal people unless you check the Google cache.

Oh and sorry if you came here looking for the pharmaceuticals. You’ll just have to get them somewhere else.