Inconvenient content

Hackers include spammish content into Al Gore's website.

Hackers have managed to break into a website set up to promote Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and include links to drug-selling sites, PCWorld reports. The hackers' aim was to boost the search engine rankings of the websites linked to by creating links to a very popular website. The added content was invisible to regular users, but visible to search engine crawlers, and the hackers must have hoped for their attack to go unnoticed.

According to Adam Thomas, malware researcher at Sunbelt Software, the hackers probably made use of a vulnerability in WordPress, the popular blogging software used for the site's blog. The spammish content, which has since been removed, is reported to have only been found on the blog.

The effects of this attack were limited, but could have been more significant had the hackers decided to include malware rather than links - as happened, for example, on the website of the Bank of India in September. The case demonstrates once again that restricting Internet browsing only to 'trusted' sites is not sufficient to avoid unwanted and malicious content. As always, VB urges both home and business users to ensure that their anti-malware software is up to date.

28 November 2007

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