You know, it’s one thing to have a website crucial to your business hacked into, but it’s quite another to let it stay hacked ALL FLIPPING DAY LONG without apparently any of you noticing. Good job! I really feel comfortable now submitting sensitive information to your site when I want to make a reservation. Oh wait… no I don’t.

This is the second time this has happened to me too. I settle on a hotel to stay at, I go to their site to make a reservation, only to find what looks like a parked domain page, except that it isn’t. Instead, some depraved disease spreading spankypants (from Romania I suspect) figures out a way to hack into the site and places code that redirects visitors to a completely unrelated site with a stonking mad truckload of affiliate based links, or worse yet, malicious code that attempts to install a trojan on your computer.

What are these affiliate links you ask? Well it’s simple, every time you click on a link on one of these hacked pages, a cookie gets saved in your browser. The cookie contains certain information that will credit the hacker with a commission if you buy the right product or service, even if it’s months down the road. That’s how they make their money, and the reason why affiliate marketing needs to either be reigned in or die some kind of violent, radioactive death.

I can’t even bring up a cached version of the hotel’s site to compare the difference to the hacked version, but suffice it to say, it was a nice and simple site that had information about the hotel, its history, contact info, parking garage info, and a link to make a reservation. That has now all been replaced, with this:

Things are not what they appear...

I checked the McAfee site rating for the link in that address (don’t go there by the way!) and sure enough, it’s one of the malicious domain names being used to propagate spam and malware.

I sent an email to the real hotel people about this with no response. Beautiful. Fire everyone in your IT department now, because they must be weapons grade numbnuts not to have noticed that the WEBSITE IS GONE. As long as it stays up more visitors will be hoodwinked and might get infected with malware. That’s what cheeses me off too.

Ok, I’m done ranting now. On the upside, the trouble here eventually led me to start an account with Hotels.com instead and use their WelcomeRewards program. I saved $12 in doing so, and now I only need seven more nights to get the next one free. Who’s awesome, baby.

Tags: affiliate links, affiliate marketing, domain, domain names, hacked, hacker, hotel, hotels, malicious code, trojan, website
Categories: Tangled Webs
 
(  Print This Post | | 26 views )