Those of you who use Google or Bing to drive their browser may have noticed that entering "popular rotorcraft association" in the search bar yields a link which will redirect you to a handbag sales site. This is not the fault of Google or Bing, but rather a hack on the PRA website.

It is probably still safe enough to browse the website (once you get there), but I would caution that it is apparently no longer completely under the control of whomever is managing the site now. Govern yourselves accordingly.

WOW.....why would anyone hack into PRA????
That is pure evil. This should be prosecuted the same way as a burglary.....

I still say everyone should pool the money they spend on antivirus software to hire mercenaries to go break arms, legs ,fingers and gouge eyes of those that hack sites.

Sounds good to me... got a ticket to Eastern Block countries...

Romania comes to mind.

Same reason as people who send meaningless spam. A certain percentage, albeit tiny, of the "ijit" population will actually buy something when they see it, regardless of the source.

This hack is a redirect to a sales site. Ad agencies (the unsavory ones) are willing to pay for redirects and there seems to be no shortage of people who are needy enough and/or lacking in scruples enough to do the deed.

There are also no shortages of people who create a website and leave the door open to this kind of thing. Unfortunately, there is no telling whether the site password was compromised or the shared hosting platform they are on has issues with other users hacking past the security. If they don't get with the ISP and flush it out, it will only get worse. If it does get worse, the next step is typically for you to get loaded up with malware when you go there. That would be very bad, because Google shuts you down after that kind of hack and you suddenly become "invisible."

Wow.......it is a sad state we are living in and until wrong doing gets punished nothing will change.

Ray: I am sorry, I don't agree.

As soon as you do that, some bleeding liberal will tax me to buy the "poor, disabled" hacker a "versy" (braille) terminal and related equipment to offset his new handicaps.

I say, just kill them a lot. Get it done the first time. No repeat offenders.

Convince the mercenary to drop by the libs home too.
I believe it would take only one or two "examples" for word to get out not to misbehave.

I have no opinion on the root cause and have provided this thread purely for the benefit of the unwary Internet browser.

@Jake...

Your right the last BOD kept people like Jon and me out of it until it was hacked! Only then this BOD turn the site and problem over to me and TIM our last Admin finally they let me in as he as quit... Oh well better late than never.
I believe Tim did not want me in until it broke as he was the main force behind buying it. Tim's the one who found the programs and selected the software and was the Admin... I was an advisor at the email meeting but had no vote and they did not listen to me.
Maybe he thought I would sabotage it as I warned, pleated, begged them not to buy it... I email the BOD that, I forgive them for just buying the same CPM crap we have now by a different programmer who will not finish and were wasting time and money and that we would have to just replace it latter, which we are now.

Would have been far better to let Jon and I do it in the 1st place but they wanted a 30K system for 5K from a professional as that BOD did not trust volunteers to perform!!! And what do you suspect happen he went bankrupt ad did not finish the 30K system for only 5K as predicted.

This latest Google redirect hack Jon just helped me by sharing that it happens with Lynix systems too.
So I download the entire site to my computer last night and used software to search for the text that was being added to the Google search list.

Found it, deleted it and changed the FTP account.

It won't be fixed until the web-search engines crawl through each page and see I've deleted the bogus page and removes it as a valid link.

Thank you Jon... It so good to have smart friends!!!!

site appears to be down now.

Don't be confused (and pardon me if I am mistaken). Rotary Wing Forum was down for a while this afternoon. The PRA site "http://www.pra.org" is working and the current apparent hack has been eliminated by John (All_in).

Now the questions are: Did they hack the FTP login, or get past a IIS vulnerability, or are they an evil hosting customer on the same shared host picking at the holes in Windows security to attack their neighbors?" And, what else did they do (if anything) while they had the site's pants down?

Not sure how often Google and the other search engines re-index the pages on our site. As soon as they do it should be fixed.

Thank you Jon...
Will have to wait and see if we get hacked again. I'll check once a day if I can, hopefully remove it before the search engines index our site.

I changed the FTP account password so if it happens again we'll move from GoDaddy to another IP service provide and deal with it that way?

I had to move mine too. GoDaddy sucked. iPage seems to be decent.

iPage does Apache only. Unfortunately, the code for the PRA website =requires= a Windows IIS webserver (aka: The Hack-a-Me Server). Fortunately, iPage has a sister company that does a pretty good job of keeping IIS shared hosting environments running and as secure as they can be. The company is webhost4life.com.

And yes, goDaddy is terrible. Network Solutions (a web.com company) and SingleHop have gone from the best to the absolute bottom of the barrel in the past 10 years. There are hundreds of other hosting companies. Some are better than others. A lot of them have carved out niches in particular platforms. There are those that have configurations that are specifically PHP-friendly. Some are even as focused as presenting themselves to be Joomla, Drupal, Magento or vBuilten "optimized." It all depends on the need and the application requirements.

Thank you Jon for leading me to iPage!
You da mostbestestest

Thank you for all the help... I'm going to take your advice and move it!

Very entertaining thread

It is just such a shame I don't speak fucking chinese so I can understand any of it

At least y'all seem to have it under control?