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Harvard University hacked in Internet Scam
Traffic on the World Wide Web has recently taken a surprising detour when a malicious browser redirect, designed by hackers who may be connected to an online mortgage lender, steered unsuspecting Web surfers to their mortgage loan sites. As a result of the perpetrators' illegal actions, the safety and integrity of .edu, .org and some .gov domains have been substantially compromised.
With the exponential increases of web traffic on the World Wide Web, the global ecommerce scene is unprecedented. With this comes the pursuit of e-marketers attempting to drive as many visitors to their individual sites as possible, with the hopes of converting those visitors to sales. The commerce world today has taken the valuable time, effort and money to implement the latest social marketing and traffic tracking technologies to drive traffic to their sites.
In this pursuit, some have resorted to black hat tactics or illegal activities to steal visitor traffic from the hard built reputation of other domains who have worked hard to establish a more favorable page rank with leading search engines.
The most recent scandal that has been deployed has hacked into the domain servers of several high profile educational organizations such as The University of North Carolina, MIT, Vassar College, University of Rochester, Harvard University, the University of California-San Diego, Purdue University, the University of Sciences Philadelphia, Smith College, Delta-Montrose Technical College, The University of Georgia, and Rowan University.
The hackers' motivation is to create a page within the hacked domain where the perpetrators can then place their optimized content. By doing so, they can take advantage of both the victims page rank, as well as the victims preferred placement in the search engine listings, to advertise their content. This also allows the offender to build their own page rank through the quality back links they have built on their illegally created pages. The .edu and .org domain extension that the perpetrators' back link is coming from provides additional benefits, since Google values .edu and .org-- largely because they believe sites within those domains deliver more reputable, less commercially biased information, since those particular sites objectives are not for profit -- above .com, .net and the like.
By illegally placing their mortgage loan page within a .edu or .org domain, the hackers put their site in a position to steal the favorable Google page rank of the violated Web page. This page rank within Google listings is absolutely vital for driving both traffic and revenue. A favorable ranking takes time, revenue and effort to achieve over an extended period of time. By hijacking this traffic, the mortgage lending company is leeching this page rank away for itself in a most dishonest, and highly illegal fashion. The amount of traffic and revenue that this scam is generating for the perpetrator must be staggering to say the least.
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