Comments on: Green Party Website Hacked (Google Innocent)

By: Nebraska Left

Nebraska Left — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:10:08 +0000

I bet someone from the “health care” industry is responsible for this hacking, because the Green Party correctly supports universal health care.

By: Third Party Revolution

Third Party Revolution — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:07:17 +0000

I wonder if the other minor parties have had similar problems before.

By: Babette Hogan

Babette Hogan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:43:47 +0000

Gregg – don’t feel foolish for scouting out a problem. You provided a service.

By: Third Party Revolution

Third Party Revolution — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:51:15 +0000

Well that’s good.

By: Gregg Jocoy

Gregg Jocoy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:17:40 +0000

Thanks to Greg and Matt from Google for the update. I visited gp.org a few times over the past few days, and it never “felt” slow to me, but I take these folks at their word.

I have gotten an education, and to be honest, feel a bit foolish. I do wonder why no phone calls to the national office were made, since that info is on the site, and we are so close to election day, but I also suppose that no site has “right” to indexing in Google.

All in all, this has been a most unpleasant adventure. Sure hope it doesn’t happen again.

Just checked again, and the search results put gp.org at the top.

By: Third Party Revolution

Third Party Revolution — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:08:13 +0000

If it is not an anti-green, then I guess it is most likely Anonymous.

By: David Doonan

David Doonan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:07:11 +0000

The offending code has been removed and steps taken to prevent this from happening. Big thanks to Greg G. at google.

By: Ronald Hardy

Ronald Hardy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:46:55 +0000

Matt – thank you!

The webmasters at gp.org have already cleaned up their site, and even found some more on other subpages and scrubbed those as well.

By: Ronald Hardy

Ronald Hardy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:45:18 +0000

Susan is likely correct – the links that were pushed onto gp.org’s site were all for purchasing certain “enhancement” drugs.

GPW gets hit with tons of spam comments that are trying to do the same thing but our spam filter keeps them from being posted. I don’t think this was political, but opportunistic.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:36:28 +0000

To the previous commenter, it’s unlikely the hack was out of any sort of anti-green sentiment. Those types of “hackers” simply look for any website that has a weakness they can exploit. Especially one which receives good traffic.

I am the webmaster of a non-controversial largish website that was recently hacked into with a very similar problem. One of the reasons Google removes the site is because the hackers can use the links they set up to redirect to their own sites. Not only is this bad for Google, but it completely slows down the host site, in this case GP.org. If GP.org were still showing up in the Google searches it is likely that the website would be barely functional based solely off the incredible amounts of hits it as a result of the hacks.