Topic: Backlinks to porn and other sites

[Ian.]

My hobby site is just that so I’m not really interested in “search engine optimisation”, that said, I do check the mail from Google showing how many pages are indexed.

The latest update showed 11.5k of pages not indexed which was odd, so looking at the report it showed Backlinks to porn and other sites referred from my /template folder.

Checking on a Backlinks webservice, I had 1.33 million.

As I don’t want any association with this, so I deleted the whole contents of /template.

The question is, have I over reacted or doesn’t it really matter?

[saratogaWX]

I see your site runs wordpress in the /blog/ directory.  Wordpress sites have a large target area to exploit in plugins and themes. 
I suggest you check the update levels for your base Wordpress, plugins and themes and install
https://www.wordfence.com/products/wordfence-free/ on your site to watch-over the issues possible with Wordpress.

In my experience, things like Picture, Blog, Guestbook are all ripe for miscreants to try to cram something untoward on your site and appropriate it as a unwilling target for hosting their schemes (pfshing, porn, bitcoin, etc).
I have a site file scanner you could use if you like.. write me at webmaster at saratoga-weather.org if you're interested.

Best regards,
Ken

[ConligWX]

Hi Ian.

are you still running ZBBlock?

[Ian.]

Hi Simon

I had to disable it as it kept causing problems for me, probably because of my lack of understanding of it.

I took Ken up on the offer of a scanner script and it found a few things which have now been deleted, one of which was a file called wxlientdraw.php which is a bad one.

[saratogaWX]

was a bad one   A classic 1-line PHP backdoor.