How long before SEO hacking goes mainstream?

I had to look twice when writing the following story at Platinax News: New Storm Worm inserts links in user messages.

The short of the story is that this is a worm that - after infecting a user’s PC - embeds links in messages the user posts to blogs, forums, and other online communities.

I had to look twice because at first I thought it was inserting links for SEO purposes.

Instead, what’s happening is that the links are simply attack vectors for infecting other people’s machines - click on the links and you’re immediately activating an executable from a malicious site to install the malware on your machine.

Imagine what would happen if the links were actually for SEO purposes?

I’ve already stated before - Hacking for SEO - that I expect to see hacking of websites become a more common - to insert new pages and especially links on hacked authority websites for SEO purposes.

However, this opens up new possibilities.

For example, we could see a virus released that infects your machine in such a way that if you use any common blogging platform, the malware will insert links into the posts you write.

A clever virus writer will make these links invisible, too - a little CSS to send them far off the viewable page, or even just to make the font size effectively invisible.

This would not simply allow for extensive use of keyword links, but also help ensure the blogger is unaware that they are even posting them.

The question surely isn’t so much if we’ll see this, as much when.