Random weird thing on the web

July 24, 2015 12:31 PM

I googled a subject and stumbled upon random porn links on a nursing home website. What's going on here?

I found the link in a google search for interviews of Chris Crocker (Leave Britney Alone!) and I thought, "Ha, this must be some nursing home newsletter with Chris Crocker gossip in it." But, the link took me to a porn website.

I then did a google search of the url that had led me there (http://www.elkmeadowsalf.com/zoae) and there are maybe a dozen that all link to porn. I'm just CURIOUS. Who would have done this? Why would someone do this and how has it escaped anyone's notice? Also, should I let the nursing home know about this?

Original link: http://www.elkmeadowsalf.com/zoae/chris-crocker-dating

posted by generic230 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Most likely it's a hacked wordpress install.

http://builtwith.com/?http%3a%2f%2fwww.elkmeadowsalf.com%2fzoae%2fchris-crocker-dating

I'd go ahead and tell them.
posted by cjorgensen at 12:35 PM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Links that go to a site increase Google's ranking of the site. So if you hack 100 sites and have them link to your porn and/or malware site, more people are going to find it through Google searches.
posted by Candleman at 12:50 PM on July 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

As someone who has tried to notify hacked sites that they've been compromised in this exact same way -- don't expect a response, or expect it to ever get fixed. I've tried many times (hotlinkers eating up my bandwidth) and how they end up compromised is that nobody's updating Wordpress, nobody's checking their email, nobody's noticing the changes on their webserver -- because the site is an orphan, there's nobody around to even fix it if they do get their email. Why they remain online, I have no idea, but you should expect to send a courtesy email and that's it, there may be no benefit in pushing further to try and get it cleaned up.

Note that they probably don't *actually* have porn on their website: what those bots create is a bunch of links with hotlinked images -- all those images (they're not all porn, but a lot are) are being hosted by somebody else's website and accessed remotely. All that gets created on the compromised website is a bunch of text files, which may or may not contain 'blue' language, as you've noticed.
posted by AzraelBrown at 1:20 PM on July 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Seconding AzraelBrown on the 'why nobody notices': a site gets built in Wordpress or whatever, the developer might provide a few months of updates (if you're lucky) but eventually there's nobody who cares about maintaining it or even knows it needs maintaining. Usually after it's rotted for months another developer gets hired and rebuilds it from scratch, and the cycle begins once more.
posted by holgate at 1:32 PM on July 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I once googled my name, and one of the main search results came up linking to a page that was on the site that seemed to be a legitimate business (so, it was legtimiatebuisiness.com/3/myfirstname-mylastname), with links on that page to some pretty unsavory porn sites (I'm guessing the site was hacked, in a way noted in the comments above). I emailed the business (as I'm sure they didn't know what was going on), and I emailed google directly via their removal request service, which gave me an automated response that it was looking into it. It was resolved in a couple of days, at least as a search result, although I never heard back about who solved it.
posted by SpacemanStix at 1:44 PM on July 24, 2015