Wrexham Council Website Suffers Minor SEO Link Exploit

The frontpage of Wrexham Council’s website was blocked for some users late this afternoon after it suffered a suspected code injection issue.

Users attempting to visit the website with anti-virus software were greeted with warnings about ‘Blackhat SEO Exploits’ (Search Engine Optimisation) being present.

Investigating further it appears that a rogue included javascript file was potentially pulling in extra information in the form of external non-public website links.

The links themselves were not visible on the Wrexham.gov.uk page, being displayed via an off screen div, in laymans terms a box that is not viewable on a normal screen. This technique is often used to hide the injection of links from human view, so they can remain there undetected.

The aim of such activity is to attempt to game search engines such as Google by pointing links from the compromised website to another to boost the rankings in a crude and almost useless manner.

Wrexham.com contacted Wrexham Council to make them aware of the issue, who then fixed the issue promptly.

A spokesperson for Wrexham Council said: “Wrexham Council’s web team quickly resolved the problem and would like to thank Wrexham.com and members of the public who took the time to report the problem to them. “

We are pretty confident in saying there was no risk to the users of the website, nor any information being put at risk due to the nature of the exploit.