This is not my site - it is the National Down Syndrome Society website (NDSS), a respected Down syndrome organization. I'm working on the resource section for a Down syndrome blog and wanted to use the description from their meta tags and found a huge amount of online pharmacy links, ******, levitra, etc in the source code. None of it shows up on the site.

This is the site http://www1.ndss.org/index.php - look at the source code and see what I mean.

Is this a case of hacking? Or is it some kind of new stealth advertising program. Maybe I'm naive, but I've never seen that before. I'm assuming it's been hacked and am sending them an email - but could I be wrong?

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Jeanne
NowAssistingYou.com
Virtual Assistant :: Web/Blog Design & Hosting :: Writer

Whoa. That's really strange. Very interested to know what you find out about it. Creepy.
Boy, Jeanne, you don't miss a trick!

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Mary H. Ruth/Virtual Writing & Communications
http://www.writingVA.com

Hi Jeanne,
Yikes! That is an awful lot of hidden links. Whether it's hacking or someone did these junk sites a 'favor' I'd definitely point it out to the site owner, or whoever you might be able to get in touch with.
At the very least, letting them know it's there and could easily be considered 'black hat' SEO by Google (and bump their otherwise very legit site off the search grid entirely) will be a favor to them.

Any webmaster who knows a thing or two about how search engines work knows there is nothing 'search legal' about hidden links so it's probably not intentional on the part of the host site.

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I really didn't think it was intentional. I sent them an email yesterday and the links are gone today. The site is Joomla (at least I saw Joomla in the code), so I'm guessing it's a Joomla security issue.

Hopefully they can keep it from happening again.

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Jeanne
NowAssistingYou.com
Virtual Assistant :: Web/Blog Design & Hosting :: Writer

It could be two things:

1 - Someone got paid to put them there, a designer, a developer etc.

2 - One of the latest techniques on black hat SEO is to hack websites and put hidden links in their source code.
Fortunately, Google and other search engines are great at detecting these automatically and these links are ignored but unfortunately the site that contains them will be penalized because it looks to Google like the site did this intentionally to make money or something.

Joomla and other open source software are vulnerable to hacking. The reason is everyone can see their source code and if there is a hole in there, hackers exploit it on websites who run the software.

It might be that their version of Joomla is old and they didn't upgrade it to the latest version and often this is the case when you find something like this has happened. New versions usually fix security issues and other bugs.

So here is the lesson from all of this:
If you use Joomla, Wordpress or any other software that is open source and free, be sure to upgrade to the latest version as soon as it's available!

I hope this helps

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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein