1 in 88 WordPress Sites Near French Town Found Secretly Serving SEO Spam

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A web agency based in Vienne, France, scanned 1,084 WordPress-powered business websites within a 25 km radius of the town to assess how many were silently compromised. Using two external detection methods — cloaking analysis and sitemap inspection — researchers identified 12 infected sites, a rate of 1.13% of the 1,066 fully analysed. The cloaking test compared pages served to regular browsers versus Googlebot, while the sitemap check scanned URLs for spam vocabulary. Notably, the two methods caught entirely different sets of six sites each, meaning either check alone would miss half the infections. Researchers noted the true infection rate is likely higher, as some sites blocked the test crawler and compromises recur over time.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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