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Hudson, FL – ASEOHosting, a leading provider of multiple IP hosting, has expressed its concern at the recent spate of SEO poisoning attacks against WordPress installations and other content management systems. The company has released an advisory to web hosting clients in order to increase awareness of SEO poisoning and how site owners can avoid being a victim.

An SEO poisoning attack involves the exploitation of vulnerabilities in content management systems to inject malicious code that alters the content of web pages. The most frequent form of SEO poisoning attack will insert dozens of links to sites the attacker aims to improve the search ranking of. More sophisticated attacks will create doorway pages filled with the attacker’s content that immediately redirect users to advertising, affiliate marketing, or malware sites. In both case, the added content will not be visible to normal visitors or the site owners, only to search engine bots.

“SEO poisoning is an old black hat SEO technique that has seen something of a resurgence in recent months,” commented ASEOHosting’s Vice President of Customer Relations, Daniel Page. “We’re aware that thousands of sites that have been victim to SEO poisoning attacks, and we feel that it’s important the web community is educated about the technique and its implications.”

The results of an SEO poisoning attack can be serious: firstly, it’s an indication that a site has an exploitable vulnerability that can be used by a malicious third-party to gain administrative access. Secondly, SEO poisoning attacks are harmful to the site’s own search ranking and can damage its reputation with users.

The most recent wave of SEO poisoning attacks were discovered by webmaster Jay Wind: in 15 minutes, [Wind] was able to round up 174 websites … and reported the issue to a number of impacted site operators who were “wholly unaware of the problem,” he wrote. As URLs to dozens more attacked sites are linked on compromised pages, he calculated that around 10,000 websites may have been impacted in the SEO poisoning campaign.

Risk mitigation for SEO poisoning attacks requires the implementation of WordPress and CMS security best practices, which include password management policies to ensure secure login credentials are used and the patching of content management systems through their upgrade process.

About ASEOHosting:
ASEOHosting is the leader in providing all types of SEO Hosting, including Shared SEO Hosting, Dedicated SEO Hosting, US Dedicated SEO Servers, and EU Dedicated SEO Servers, based in Orlando, FL, and Detroit, MI, owned and operated by Ahosting, Inc., supplying hosting services that are truly beyond imagination. Since 2002, ASEOHosting has established one of the web’s premier solutions for reseller web hosting, multiple IP hosting, dedicated servers, and VPS hosting. For more information, visit http://www.aseohosting.com.

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