I am going to give a background on this.., One of my Tech sites is responsible for 35% of my income. This site is over 2 years old has been number one for over 75 different terms. It has 2 content writers working on it full time. The site is listed in all the major directories including DMOZ. One Wednesday the site tanked.
The site tanked for all 75 terms and it was obvious it was a sidewide penalty, scratching my head and figuring out WTF just happened I began to investigate. Working through the night on Wednesday and Thursday, I figured out that someone decided to do a full blown negative seo attack on this site. With 23 different domains doing a malware redirect! This little stunt has costed me a LOT of money. So come friday, and it broke down like this:-
Friday 15th of July 2011
6.00 am woke up
6.15 am worked on my reconsideration request, citing all the possible sites that were attacking my sites.
8.15am breakfast
8.30am Checked the stats for yesterday so far soo god (apart from the obvious site)
9.00 Get an e-mail from one of my employees that he will be leaving, no problem that’s cool will find another I thought
9.30 Go to the graveyard to pay my weekely respects to my father
10.30 Arrive back home
10.35 Get a call from a debt management company saying I owe them £13,000 ! huh I thought but apparently someone has been using my identity and living in poplar (another part of London) and that bastard had taken out bt lines, cable, credit cards under my name all of which now amount to 13K I explained to them that I know nothing about this and I have been living at my local residence for 15 years. They suggest I contact the police and my solicitor.
11.20 I call up my lawyer (we are on first name basis now lol) tell him the situation and he ask me to come in one hour at his office Its a quick chat
11.25 I long on and only to find that another site of mine has been totalled, this was not a big site but still annoying none the less. I spent the next 45 mins trying to figure out what happened to that site
12:35 I arrive at my Laywer’s and they say they will look into this, perhaps the debt settlement company itself is a fraud? they take all the details down like my bills etc that I have been paying whilst residing at my address. Then I head off to the police station
13:10 Arrive at the station, only to find out the que is over 5 hours long. So I wait, during which i decide to amuse myself with a bit of angry birds, this of course results in my iphone dying.
17:00 I finally see the police report the problem get a crime reference number and then come home (still counting myself lucky as was prepared for 5 hour wait)
17:00 Hungry enough to eat a horse I decide I am going to check e-mails first. I discover that 6 more of my employees have decided to quit on the same day, suspicious i give one of them a call. Only to find out that one of my competing affiliates/company has hired them all. In essence that hired one of my project managers, and he then contact the team as he knew it.
17:45 Feeling like I could murder a few people, I eat my dinner and decide I need to do damage control. Remote lock all of their software, remove admin rights to VPS disallow them access to dropbox. Everything, though the chances are that what needed to be copied was already done so.
19:45 I have my tea only to discover that My other big site is now under a DDOS attack, the server is uptodate but the site goes down.
22:00 I decide to change the DNS and move it to my reserve server.
01:00 I try and figure out what the f happened to my other smaller site..
Semi comatose I then fall asleep. So not what I had planned for my Friday, apart from the ramification of all of this which basically means that my July has gone interms of its targets. I now have to sit with a possibility of hiring/training new people!
Days like this is why I wonder why I just dont do boring 9-5
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Are you assuming it was the competition that stole the employees attacked the sites as well? Pretty shocking all that could happen in one day!
You know where I am when you’re looking for employees
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No two different entities, the person who stole the employees I know him quiet well, some might even say we are friends but as he has told me business is business. The attack is something he would never risk. I am confident this has come from elsewhere.
I will be giving you an e-mail once things settle down, atleast until I know I can afford to pay you for anything longer then 4 months lol..
wow, I hope you manage to recover from this!
I knew some affiliates used underhand tactics but didn’t expect people would steal your staff or DDOS your sites! Bit of an eye opener really.. it’s bad enough worrying about google all the time let alone external threats that could destroy your business.
How could you protect against malware attacks?
Good luck buddy!
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Hi Rich,
Thanks for the support, its part and parcel of running a buisness. What i did not blog about (i think) this happened a year and a half ago as well at that time My income was reliant on one source. This nearly drove me out. It is at that point i decided to diversify.
The new bread of sites for me will be launched in 1.5 years time. They will have no track backs to me, they will be my true “anonymous” sites. Having a blog works both good and bad ways. Sometimes i get people contacting me and saying they saw my site (saw the whois) and i was ranking for this term so congratulations. Which is always nice to read.
Sometimes people get jealous, especially after my last reported income in my last blog. Now they either don’t believe you (which is cool) or they think I dont deserve it lol.
The staff issue is really another affiliate who is bigger then i am and whom i compete against has decided to take my staff. I would not really call him an affiliate but more of a big buisness. Anyway they have in some cases tripled my staffs income, income to discover what I do differently to get my sites to rank.
What has been a policy of mine for last few years is NEVER to give full information out to any particular link builder/project manager. This is one of the MAIN reasons why i have not expanded a lot more. As I do at least 25% of the work for each site Which leaves me exhausted, but days like Firday make me realize why i do it this way.
Regards
Mansoor
Hi Mansoor,
I think it’s just a case of ‘the buses theory’ in reverse! One never comes when you want one, and when you don’t, they come at you from all directions!
Seems a bit of coincidence, but a real bummer too. I really hope you recover from this mate, and agree that diversification is the key.
Curious as to how you detect Malaware attacks. Is this done by checking analytics or server logs and visiting IP addresses or something similar?
Cheers,
Peter
yeah the buses theory lol.. recovery will be ok.. but I am immediately out 35-40% of my income which is a blow. I just started (2 months ago) using these guys http://www.scanmywebsite.in/DisplayPage.aspx?pgID=NQ== I use thier package 2 enterprise edition.
So far so good.. they scan and actively come up against threats. Though to be honest did not do so well in DDoS for the site.. will have to look into that once things have settled down a bit
I also have sitelock for other key sites.. never had it tested though, but at $500 a pop its can be a very expensive or easy solution depending on the number of your sites/pages you ask it to scan
Mansoor
Thanks for the link, Mansoor.
You’re not the only one, as SeNukeX was hit by a DOS attack last week: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/413226-senuke-x-down.html
I’m thinking that there may be ways to reduce the chance of an attack at source, i.e. by improving a site’s security, e.g. if the site is WordPress (which has known vulnerabilities), then improve the WP security to reduce the risk of anyone hacking in.
Good luck,
Peter
No problem there are of course precautions you can take. A brute force attack is from my understanding literally raw power overloading the server which thousands of requests a minute. Certain sites like those on Cloud server cope generally well with these types of attack however as the number of requests goes up so does the bandwidth hence the cost. I am aware of senuk X being down. Though I can access it just fine from my Vps’s
Regards
Mansoor
Find out who it was that DDOS’s and malwared your sites if you can and sue them. They are trying to destroy your livelihood and is infact no diffrerent from if you had a shop and the rival shop across the street decided to trash your premises so you cannot trade.
Simon, you are right there are two problems right now.. First off all my network tells me its coming from server in china and a secondary attack from a server in Germany. I don’t have the technical knowledge to be honest to determine what is going on. But may well hire someone to investigate this
From past experience the china one is a very difficult especially if they use rotating ips (i think) as we could never trace it back last time around. I do believe this is a personal attack more then anything, but I might also be getting paranoid. Right now its just despair…
Wow, I cant believe your luck at the moment Mansoor. I suggest you hire a security firm to try and track the culprits. Your going to have to do something, Otherwise others will think it would be appropriate to hack your sites as you don’t react when they do.
Just another reason for affiliates to keep their sites a closely guarded secret.
Chirs, Fully intend on taking this further. Right now Am just doing damage control, already have contacted a firm regarding this. My hosting recommended them to me, and they are/have been recording all metrics to present to this firm.
I have also asked my lawyer to recommend some relevant lawyers for when this gets taken forward. This Friday events will cost me upwards of 20K and that is not a small amount. I fully agree about keeping your sites private, my new generation of sites will be just that registered under a new company name and other precautions that I wont talk about here.
I think I am going to take a break and just go to the cinema by myself and watch transformers lol
Hey Mansoor
Just reading this and I am truly shocked. I’ve dropped you an email so you know who this is!!
However, I’m sure I hinted at you a few months back to NOT disclose your income yet you do this and I don’t understand why. You need to cover your tracks.
I can just about guarantee you that the person who was behind this probably reads this blog, and a few of your blog readers are secretly happy this has happened. Many people unfortunately have a “poor thinking mindset” which means they secretly (and sometimes openly) hate loathe dislike those who are earning money through being proactive.
They are also jealous as you correctly note. But this look an expensive operation so I doubt the average affiliate could do it. Must have been some big competitor?
How did your competitor find out who your staff were? How can you be so sure they are not responsible for the attacks on your site?
How can your competitor be your friend? <<<<<< you need to think about this!
You need to get the police involved and get this investigated. If someone stole 20k from me I wouldn't just tell the police, knowing my personality, I'd probably take it one step further
Hey Yeah I knew this is you the min I saw your e-mail, in the comment
Yes you not only hinted but infact told me not to publish my income, the reason why I did it was to motivate, and encourage. It was not long ago that I was the same affiliate trying to make 200 a month or more. As I learnt and evolved more, I thought I would help more and more.
And that is what I tried, and I hope in a very very little way I helped few people out, see things differently. If one person earns a better living through me I THOUGHT that would be worth while. Sounds self riotous right?
This attack was an expensive operation, from my understanding it requires 2-3 separate dedicated servers and multiple hosting accounts to do it. It certainly is NOT a spur of the moment thing. The Site getting a DDOS is up and running on a backup server now (though slower). The Site with malware redirects is down for the count.. Its now has over 180 pages with a -50 penalty. That really breaks my heart to be honest. All these 180 pages were ranking for one or 2 keywords, and ALL of them were top 2!
The smaller site that also dropped I can guess who is behind that, but I know their sites as well infact I know ALL their sites (insert evil laugh here). this smaller site also has a domain wide penalty AND the sneaky buggers emptied my .htaccess file content. Do you know what happens when that happens? I did not know but aparently if you place an empty .htaccess files all your links to every page apart from the homepage return a 404 error!!
One of my UK staff contacted my competitor that is the closest I can guess. I dont hold poaching of staff against anyone it happens in the real world every day. I will have a problem if I find out my files were taken from me, there will be lawyers involved with that.
I am all for taking actions, though in all honesty I want all facts straight, before I get with my actions. There is no doubt this will have a knock on effect. I know this poaching is related to the big project I told you about
How terrible! Almost makes me glad I never hit the big time if this is what you have to deal with. I though me only earning £7 yesterday was bad but this takes the biscuit. Hope you bounce back.
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Joe I have not hit the big time, but am medium (maybe less then medium). But I am like a Chua Circuit, when it comes to attracting chaos and drama.
Hi Mansoor, I’m sorry to read about your recent hassle (understatement not intended!). By publishing your earnings you have been a great help in getting me motivated and staying in this game, and even though you probably regret it now, I want to thank you for doing it. With all the recent events you have been through, I think this is one of those hard times people go through that either make or break them, and I think you’re handling it very well and greatness is waiting for you on the other side.
Thank you Dean
Not really bothered about Greatness just a steady 4 months would be nice lol..
Wow! What a rough day.
It may not be any consolation, but your former employees are really shooting themselves in the foot. I’m pretty certain that once your competitor squeezes them for all the information he can, he’ll let them go. Is he really going to keep paying them three times what they were making before?
I doubt it.
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Thank you Carla,
The real consolidation was that I have a habit of modularizing my work, so no one person knows every thing and on top of that the real part that adds my special juice in links is done by me only. So my link builders were going to be an almost straight waste.
My content writers and manager, was just an attempt to slow me down. That worked as I now have a ton of work that I will not be able to go through on my own.
Hi Mansoor,
I just found this blog and I *think* I commented on one of your old post in your old blog. Dunno, seems familiar to me. Anyway, that is just one horrible day! It’s amazing that you can pull through this. All the best for your future ventures, and hope your son recovers well!
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