Search Engine Marketing Spot

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed. Thank you for visiting SEMSPot!

Spot On Tuesday’s tip of the week is more of a warning then anything else. I felt it was needed to make this exploit public as soon as possible because I do not condone in hacking any website. This method was being used for two things, one to deface the website completely and redirect it to where ever the person intended and secondly this method is being used to add links to the website in an effort to increase the backlinks for whomever. Imagine you find 200 sites, some have a low PR, some have a high PR and you used this method to add as many links as you saw fit to help boost your site. This not only allows you to do that, it also gives you full admin rights to the site and that is why I feel it was needed to bring this out in the open. This exploit revolves around phprealestatescript.com, which they have issued a fix for this known problem as of this posting. If you or anyone you know that uses this script on there website (mainly real estate websites) then please pass this information along to them and have them download the fix for this attack. You can download the patch here from there site. I will show you how this method is used by people, so let’s get started.

Step 1. Do a search on Google for “Browse with Interactive Map” with the quotation marks. This will bring up results like these on the first page.

Step 2. Find a site that has not already been exploited, just go to like page 19 and you will be able to test this method out. If you find sites that are still vulnerable then PLEASE contact them and let them know how to fix it. In the browser simply put in

www.website.com/fullnews.php?id=-1/**/UNION/**/ALL/**/SELECT/**/1,2,concat(username,char(58),password),4,5/**/FROM/**/admin/*

Of course you will need to change the website.com to whatever the actual site address is. Once entered, if the site has not already been compromised it will bring up a screen like this.

Step 3. As you can see by the image, we now have the admin login information for this website. Now a quick visit to www.sitename.com/admin/login.php and you should see the admin login.

With admin access you have rights to the site and can make changes as you see fit. Now imagine a high traffic website that is now running your affiliate ads, or has site links inserted on high profile pages, etc. Yes this is pretty damn evil, but as shown above there are people who are taking down entire sites using this method. I hope you take this serious and update any websites you, friends, clients that use this real estate script for there website. The damage is extreme, a patch has been issued by the script creators so please go and update your’s ASAP!

This article was originally written and posted on SEMSpot.com, a Search Engine Marketing Blog. If you like the article please sign up to our RSS Feed.