No-one in the IT department has noticed
Surely the boss has noticed the long hours the helpdesk are 'suddenly pulling' and the lack of paper tissues in the office!
Blizzard of smut cuts off Council websites
If you’re seeking smut, you only need go as far at present as the leafy green home pages of West Wittering Parish Council. Or there's Worcestershire County Council’s Healthy Schools Forum which, in an area dedicated to "internet safety", advises visitors on where to find "sexy escorts", before inviting them into a chat room to …
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 15:14 GMT TeeCee
Sheltering behind a .gov.uk URL.
Exactly what makes this "safer"? Is it that the various bots 'n such that generate the link stats are less likely to write off results from such an address? Or is it just that the site's far more likely to adminstered by an incompetant, time-serving dweeb so the lavish plastering of hot pr0n links is less likely to be detected?
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 15:37 GMT Martin Gregorie
So what's new
Last year I found the same had happened to an aviation-related online magazine. Possibly co-incidentally, this happened during a change of editor.
I e-mailed them about the problem, never got a response. After a month or so nothing had changed in the forum^W pron listing though new material had started to appear on the front page.
I scrapped my reference to them at that point, so now I neither know nor care what they've done about it.
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 16:01 GMT Richard Porter
Why take the site down?
One of my sites got hacked a while ago. I just deleted the files that shouldn't have been there, replaced any others that had been updated at the same time and changed the password. It has been OK since then.
The problem with these organisations is that they're not exactly "with it" as regards the web but they think they ought to have a site and get someone else to 'do it'. After that box has been ticked they forget all about it.
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 17:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
LOL
A humorous way to highlight the idiocies of the dogma spilling out of Downing Street every five minutes, as well as the complete failure of those empowered to tell the rest of us how to behave, to police themselves. Gotta love 'teh interwebz', eh?
Paris - because she knows better than any, that nobody is perfect (not even her).
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 21:57 GMT mh.
Forum Spam
Probably about the only that stands out about this is that it has a gov.uk address. A lot of forum admin consists of chucking out spam registrations where the spammer wants to post links to sites full of fake drugs, counterfeit shoes and pr0n sites that are about as compelling as the Kays catalogue. Most of these registrations are automated using stuff like Xrumer or just doing a Google search for things like inurl:smf or inurl:phpbb. I've seen other forums where there are about 20 legit users and hundreds of spam ones. The only real way with to deal with it is manual account activation and checking if the emails or usernames haven't been used to spamvertise on other forums.
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Wednesday 4th February 2009 00:29 GMT Unlimited
not just link spam
Not sure if I've misunderstood, or if some of the commentors have.
"gain access to their server and set up a directory and chat forum that would be invisible to the public"
I read this to mean that there wasn't a public forum that got spammed. Server got compromised and a forum installed to be used as a link dump.
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Wednesday 4th February 2009 02:34 GMT John Ozimek
@not just link spam
"I read this to mean that there wasn't a public forum that got spammed. Server got compromised and a forum installed to be used as a link dump".
Absolutely. It is not clear what happened on some of the other sites. Worcestershire seem to run a bona fide forum which just got link spammed. However, West Wittering don't.
They were thinking of setting up a forum - possibly this will put them off. So in effect, the hack used an exploit to get on to their server and then either installed a forum of its own or activated something that was there but unused.
If you looked at the site structure (before they took it down) there was very clearly a spurious directory that got added some while after the main site was put up.
That is one of the reasons for looking at this more closely. Link spam? Not much of an issue. Spam sat on .gov.uk domains may be a bit more, since it implies a lack of moderation on some government sites.
But exploits that colonise your site from within are something that fewer people are aware of, and also denote an attack that is just that bit higher up the malware food chain. Of course, one solution is to do a regular check of your own site for "+porn"... which will work fine unless you site happens to be a porn site.
Then you might have problems.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
