16 Pharma Hacks APR 2021 – WP Security Exploits for SEO/DDoS

BRIEF: Pharma Hacks APR 2021 is an SEO spam attack type, where a legitimate website is used to sell illicit drugs. In this type of attack, hackers hijack websites, injects malware and uses that specific domain to sell illicit drugs like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra. This is where it started and got its name. Today, not just potency drugs are a drive. Anything that created interest from humans, but their local legislation failed to keep up with the latest trends are in this category. Consider this as a modern inquisition, where your domain is the heretic, spreading undesired ideology - sadly unknowingly.

Pharma Hacks Explained

The Pharma Hacks APR 2021 exploits are used to insert rogue code in outdated versions of WordPress, themes and plugins. This new content inside existing pages and post are causing search engines to return ads for pharmaceutical products after a new indexation. The vulnerability is more of a spam menace than traditional malware but gives search engines enough reason to block the domain for distributing spam (NOT creating, JUST maintaining, harbouring, spreading).

Working parts of a Pharma Hacks APR 2021 include a backdoor in plugins, themes and databases. However, the exploits are often vicious variants of encrypted malicious injections hidden in databases and require a thorough clean-up process to fix the vulnerability. Nevertheless, you can easily prevent Pharma Hacks by regularly updating your WordPress installations, themes, and plugins.

What is the impact of Pharma Hacks APR 2021?

The consequences of a hack are ugly. You will experience some major backlash on your WordPress domain such as:

- A marked drop in search engine rankings for the keywords you’re targeting;
- High bounce rates as visitors are redirected to different websites;
- Wasted SEO efforts in the future;
- SERP blacklist warnings on your website like:
-- This site may be hacked
-- Deceptive site ahead etc;
-- Hosting account suspensions;
-- Email providers blacklisting your domain;
-- High cleanup, recovery, damage control costs;
-- Major decline in your brand’s image, reputation.

What is Denial of Service (DoS)?

Perhaps the most dangerous of them all, Denial of Service (DoS) is used to overwhelm a specific domain's hosting resources (memory, CPU, bandwidth, etc). Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.

Hackers have compromised millions of websites and raked in millions by exploiting outdated and buggy versions of WordPress, themes, plugins and 3rd party connected software. Even the latest versions of WordPress software cannot comprehensively defend against high-profile DoS attacks, but will at least help you to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between financial institutions and sophisticated cybercriminals.

What is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the most powerful weapons on the internet. When you hear about a website being “brought down by hackers”, it generally means it has become a victim of a DDoS attack. In short, this means that hackers made that domain unavailable by flooding or crashing the website with too much traffic.

Although financially motivated cybercriminals are less likely to target small companies, they tend to compromise outdated vulnerable websites in creating botnet chains to attack large businesses. The primary way a DDoS is accomplished is through a network of remotely controlled, hacked domains. This is where small businesses come to the crossfire. These are often referred to as zombies, botnets or network of bots. These are used to flood a high profile target.

What is the impact of DoS/DDoS?

Starts with a slow website, with vital parts not working accordingly (checkout, orders/account registration, processing, dispatching). It peaks for a real visitor as page not available. When the entire server crashed, then the domain is unavailable. END GAME.

This is a costly thing to defend in a cloud environment, due to creating more and more servers to serve traffic spike, it burns your hosting budget for an entire year in a few hours. In classical hosting environments, using a single physical machine to host the domain is simply incapable of facing even the most simple, smallest DoS or DDoS attacks.