Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs Hacked?

This blog was recently hacked, and one thing I kept hearing over and over again from readers and friends was: “oh, that is so bad, I hope it never happens to my blog”.

Unfortunately, ‘hope’ is about as useless as an ejector seat in a helicopter against hackers, I don’t ever recall hearing that a hacker was unable to hack into NASA because they were hoping he wouldn’t.

So I contacted a good friend, and we decided to take matters into our own hands, we decided that this would be our good deed for the year, and almost definitely a fast-track into karma heaven.

So we rolled up our sleeves and worked well into the night, searching each and EVERY blog in the infamous top 100 make money online list for any sign that they had also been hacked.

We checked all the big names, from John Chow to Problogger, from Copyblogger to Shoemoney, Jim Kukral to Blueverse.

We started with some good news, none of the BIG 10 had been infected.

Our spirits were high, surely none of the top 100 blogs would be infected… but then I was reminded that DeanHunt.com was in the top 50 when it was hacked.

So onwards we marched, all the way from number 1 to number 100, performing checks on every site on the list.

We finally reached blog 100 in the early hours, exhausted and dizzy.

Had we found a hacked blog? Had one of the top 100 blogs been hacked?

You are not going to believe the answer…

Find out next week when I reveal all….

JUST JOKING

Yes, and yes! One of the top blogs was infected, in fact, it was a blog from within the top 50.

See the screenshot below for proof of what we found:

As you can see, the top 40 blog Affiliate Confession has been well and truly hacked and infected with invisible junk links to ringtone websites. The spam links are still there at the time of writing this.

Now let’s put this into perspective: this is a top 40 site, with over 440 feed readers, it hasn’t been neglected, infact, the most recent post was 24 hours ago, and clearly the owner knows what he is doing.

If you include DeanHunt.com that means that 1 out of every 25 blogs have been infected in the top 50 sites, and remember, these are the big players. Imagine what it is like elsewhere in other industries.

So once again, this is a shout to everyone who owns a WordPress blog, check your site using the free tool we have created, then read this post to make sure you are protected.

For everyone else, again, we ask you to spread the word, afterall, that such big sites have been infected is BIG news, so mention this on your twitter, blogs, facebook, digg etc….

Together we can raise awareness.

Thankyou.

Dean Hunt (with a lot of help from Paul)