Link: www .mcdonalds.ca/en/news/canadian_pr.aspx?pr_ID=124 (remove the spaces) shows up on first page for "buy levitra" in Canada. Interesting.
wow, amazing. I had a good look at it. The domain is genuine and owned by mcdonalds so its not just a similar domain bought up by some guy. The root domain also uses the official mcdonalds homepage. If you look at the backlink data for the page you can se that a significant number of the links point to the page using the anchor text "buy levitra online" for which the page ranks much higher. It's quite clear to me that someone has made a big effort to get the page ranked under this phrase. Unless McDonalds has suddenly decided to sell viagra from it's primary domain I would suggest someone has hacked the page to redirect to a page selling viagra. Why? Well the hacker will probably make some money off selling viagra/levitra, but he may as well have bought his own aged domain and SEO'd that instead. So really, I think the main motive here is that the hacker is attempting to blackmail McDonalds, that is, refusing to change it back to normal unless his demands are met. Just a theory, any other opinions?
I don't think it's blackmail... it should be pretty easy for their sysadmin to plug their security hole once they figure it out. Hacked websites usually come back up pretty quickly. I think McDonalds simply doesn't know about it.
Hmm the attack on the mcdonalds site might quite possibly be this http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/600000-backlinks-in-one-go.html
I don't think they know about it, and I don't think it's blackmail either. Maybe it was a page with an article/news, and then comments. Someone spammed up the comments section. Google caught it, cached it. Later the page was deleted for some reason. Or am I totally off?
Yep! That is what I was thinking it was while reading the thread, before even seeing this post. SQL injections are pretty common, but also very easy to block which is why I don't understand a big company like McDonalds didn't block such a thing. WebKnight is one of the better softwares for blocking SQL injections (aqtronix.com/?PageID=98)