Hackers Target Al Gore’s Blog

Cyber-terrorists gained illegal access into the Internet site of ex-Vice President and ecological advocate Al Gore. The attack aimed Gore's blog, which was designed to push the documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth". The Web page has been changed to harbor links to sites advertizing online drugs.

Security analysts of Sunbelt Software allege that the links seem to have been designed with a view to increase the net traffic to Websites that advertize the pharmaceuticals. They have names like "Buy Valium Online", "Viagra," and "Xanax On Line."

The attack appeared to have been just restricted to the Web log and was alleged to have been stealing the Web page's huge traffic to boost their sites search engine outcome, which is contingent on the total hits drawn by the host site.

The links were not discovered on the Web page, but on its source code. The links directed to a site being operated by the Santa Barbara, California-based Westmont College.

The blog, being hosted by the domain climatecrisis.net, is certified to the Al Gore's notable Oscar-winning film on global warming. According to security researchers, only those pages connected with the blog seem to have been infected.

While the crawler software utilized by search engines can detect the drug-pushing links, majority of the users wouldn't even realize that they are present there. Since these links cannot be detected on the Web page, just the individuals maintaining the site would be capable of changing the page.

Web scammers have been exploiting this method for a long time now, stuffing infected Internet sites with links to their merchandise with the intention of increasing their position on search engines like Ask.com and Google. One more comparable method, called the "comment spam", entails deluging the comment portion of Internet sites with these kinds of links.

Adam Thomas, the malware investigator at Sunbelt Software, alleged that the cyber-terrorists had aimed Gore's blog since it had an excellent page rating which they used as a type of means to earn an equally high Google page rating, and thus, they wish to come across some fools who would purchase a few drugs online, reported AHN on November 27, 2007.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 12/11/2007