Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Ripoff Report Shuts Out 'Reputation Management' Hacker

Consumer advocacy website now functioning normally

Aug 22, 2011 | 01:21 PM | 


PHOENIX, Aug. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Ripoff Report recently detected and successfully defeated an ongoing hack of its consumer advocacy website, RipoffReport.com.

Earlier this year, a hacker, promising his customers "reputation management" services, had embedded code into the website to prevent search engines from recognizing certain postings. In some cases, website visitors were misdirected to a false message stating that the posting had been redacted.

A RipoffReport.com investigation revealed that the hacker had been commissioned by reputation management companies that accepted thousands of dollars in monthly fees from their clients, promising that Ripoff Report postings about the businesses could be removed from search engine results or deleted from the Internet altogether.

Although the hack was effective in interfering with public access to certain postings for several months, the RipoffReport.com website has been fully restored to normal function and all consumer postings are once again available to search engines and the public without obstruction.

RipoffReport.com website editor Ed Magedson cautions business owners that if a reputation management company makes an offer that seems too good to be true, it probably is. "Any company claiming to remove reports from RipoffReport.com, is admitting to breaking the law because Ripoff Report does not authorize the removal of reports," says Magedson.

About Ripoff Report

RipoffReport.com is one of the largest and consumer advocacy reporting websites in the United States. Privately owned and operated, it was established by Magedson in December 1998 to enable consumers to post reports detailing their experience with any company or individual within a company. Once a company has been named in a consumer's report, the company may respond by posting a rebuttal. Both reports and rebuttals are posted free of charge, and once submitted they are not removed. Before a report may be submitted, users are required to create an account by providing a valid email address and warrant that any report submitted is truthful and accurate.

Ripoff Report.com is comprised of more than 500,000 web pages and is supported, in part, by private contributions. To make a non-tax deductible donation, send a check to: Ripoff Report, P.O. Box 310. Tempe, AZ 85280 or you can make a donation online.



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS












Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports
Bugs
ENTERPRISE VULNERABILITIES
Vulnerability:ssl-vpn end-point interrogator/installer activex control
Published:2010-11-03
Severity:High
Description:Stack-based buffer overflow in SonicWALL SSL-VPN End-Point Interrogator/Installer ActiveX control (Aventail.EPInstaller) before 10.5.2 and 10.0.5 hotfix 3 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via long (1) CabURL and (2) Location arguments to the Install3rdPartyComponent method.
Vulnerability:gvim
Published:2010-11-03
Severity:High
Description:Untrusted search path vulnerability in VIM Development Group GVim before 7.3.034, and possibly other versions before 7.3.46, allows local users, and possibly remote attackers, to execute arbitrary code and conduct DLL hijacking attacks via a Trojan horse User32.dll or other DLL that is located in the same folder as a .TXT file. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information.
Vulnerability:cforms
Published:2010-11-03
Severity:Medium
Description:Multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php in cforms WordPress plugin 11.5 allow remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via the (1) rs and (2) rsargs[] parameters.
Vulnerability:links, wsn links, wsn links
Published:2010-11-03
Severity:High
Description:Multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities in search.php in WSN Links 5.0.x before 5.0.81, 5.1.x before 5.1.51, and 6.0.x before 6.0.1 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands via the (1) namecondition or (2) namesearch parameter.
Vulnerability:deluxebb
Published:2010-11-03
Severity:Medium
Description:SQL injection vulnerability in misc.php in DeluxeBB 1.3, and possibly earlier, when magic_quotes_gpc is disabled, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands via the xthedateformat parameter in a register action, a different vector than CVE-2005-2989, CVE-2006-2503, and CVE-2009-1033.