Websites hacked by PAPERHELP.ORG

FEB 15, 2021 UPDATE: Nearly six years after the hack, most sites on this list have discovered and cleaned up the malicious code left on their sites by PAPERHELP.ORG.

On April 17, 2015, one of the WordPress blogs on this site was hacked by Essay SEO scammers at PAPERHELP.ORG. The hacking involved cloaked content injection as well as cloaked code injection.

The mechanism of the hack worked like this: Roughly 500 websites were hacked by PAPERHELP.ORG, and non-existant pages linked together in a massive webring. For example, a page such as YOURSITE.COM/WRITE-MY-ESSAY/ might link to MYSITE.COM/FREE-RESEARCH-PAPER/. The content of these links was cloaked however, so that only Google Bot was able to see and index them. By this method, each of the hacked websites (and their writing-related pages) rose in the search engine rankings.

Once these pages were indexed by Google, an unsuspecting web visitor who clicked on one of them in the Search Engine Results page was directed to the page on the victim's site, where cloaked code promptly redirected them to the PAPERHELP.ORG site. (This only worked when the visitor arrived via the Search Engine Results page — simply typing the URL in the Address Bar resulted in a 404: File Not Found error.)

The following is a list of other sites besides my own which were hacked by PAPERHELP.ORG. The owners of these sites should immediately contact their webmaster or web host for technical help.

The above-mentioned owners can test whether they've indeed been hacked by searching for their site on Google using the following code:

site:YourSiteName.com

Sites which have been hacked will display numerous writing and essay related pages in the Search Engine Results which the site owner never created himself.

Chou Seh-fu

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Websites hacked by PAPERHELP.ORG