We scanned 1,084 WordPress sites around a small French town. 1.13% were quietly serving spam to Google.
I run a small web agency in Vienne, a town of 30,000 people south of Lyon. Our clients are craftspeople, shops and small businesses, and a lot of them run WordPress sites that nobody has touched in years. A hacked WordPress site often looks perfectly normal to its owner. So we wanted a number: how many local business sites are quietly compromised right now? The dataset 3,388 business domains…
A web agency in Vienne, a town of 30,000 people in south-central France, conducted a study to determine the prevalence of compromised WordPress sites among local businesses. Of the 3,388 business domains pulled from OpenStreetMap within a 25 km radius, 1,084 of them ran WordPress, accounting for 41.8% of the responsive sites. After thoroughly analyzing the sites, the study found that only 1.13% of them were quietly serving spam to Google, without any visible signs to the site owners.
To identify the compromised sites, the researchers employed two methods: cloaking and sitemap analysis. The cloaking method involved comparing responses to Googlebot and a browser User-Agent, while the sitemap analysis checked for spam vocabulary in the sitemap URLs. The two methods had no overlapping results, which means that running just one method would miss half the infections.
The study also revealed that the majority of sites were affected by outdated WordPress versions, with 38% running a branch older than version 7.0 and 14% older than version 6.5. These older versions are not yet hacked but pose a significant risk for future infections. The detection methods had a 100% precision rate for automatic alerts, but the human-review tier was only correct 2 out of 6 times.
Therefore, it's recommended to avoid automatic alerts on the human-review tier. The researchers also developed a free WordPress hack checker that allows site owners to verify the findings themselves.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
