How US military, Australian government and e-commece sites around the world have been hacked to sell cheap NFL jerseys

When I discovered hacking attempts on one of our servers last week, what we found upon investigation were even more hacking exploits on platforms including Magento, WordPress, aspx, PHP, and even a ColdFusion website.

These hack attempts seem to have originated from Chinese counterfeited product sites, with the strange outcome of things like cheap, replica NFL jerseys being sold on legitimate US government sites.

This has been a major hack, which has managed to infiltrate thousands of websites across the world, messing with SEO in the process.

No one is immune form these sort of hacks. There was a saying back in the dim, dark pre-Google days of online: Security by obscurity. Basically you wouldn’t get hacked because no one knew you existed.

The moral of the story here is: keep your site updated because these types of hack attacks are only going to get more prevalent.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.