Cyber Criminals Hacked Argentinean Government Websites

Security experts at Web-based integrity monitoring and malware detection solutions 'Sucuri' has revealed that some websites of the Argentinean Government are being abused by hackers.

The security company states that around twelve websites seem to be used in Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Campaigns (BHSEO), which try to capture keywords of different restricted drugs used to cure depression or lessen pain and distinctive enhancement pills. BHSEO is a practice that artificially raises sites in search results according to a series of keywords.

Hackers use the method to manipulate search engine results related to present event and deceive web users on their harmful websites. The firm states that the hackers are so efficient that they can poison almost every result appear on the first page while doing Google search.

Dadiv Dede, a Security Researcher at Sucuri, notes that what's horrible than spam messages is that these websites have been attacked and nobody is paying attention or taking any precaution to remove infection from them. Some of the pages have malware too, as per the reports by softpedia on July 9, 2010.

Besides hacking, another interesting fact that has been noticed by Sucuri researchers is that it is very difficult to examine how the Argentinean sites abused. While it is tough to know the sources of all the websites, some of them still run old and susceptible versions of WordPress and some have bad-coded custom applications vulnerable to SQL injection.

As per the researchers, Argentina is not only the country where the Government has unsuccessful in protecting its web properties from hackers. During June 2010, Sucuri blogged that several Brazilian government websites had been used in a large blackhat SEO spam network.

Finally, legitimate websites like Government sites is actually used to circulate malware as noted by Sucuri, and is supported by the latest research paper of security firm "MessageLabs". MessageLabs state that nearly 90% of all the sites circulate malware via authentic sites hijacked by hackers.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 7/21/2010