Monday, November 26, 2007

His Creation Now Haunts Him


I certainly don't advocate hacking, but this is too good to pass up.

Another inconvenient truth: Al Gore's Web site hacked
A blog set up to promote former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, has been hacked and is hosting links to Web sites hawking online pharmaceuticals.

The links appear to have been created as part of a scheme to boost the Web traffic for sites that promote the drugs, security experts said Monday. They contain titles such as "Xanax On Line," "Viagra," and "Buy Valium Online."

Cyber scammers have been using this technique for months now, packing hacked Web sites with links to their products in hopes of bumping up their rankings on search engines like Google and Ask.com. Another similar tactic, known as "comment spam," involves flooding the comment sections of Web sites with these types of links.

Because search engines give priority to pages that are linked to by very popular pages, adding links from the Inconvenient Truth blog would be a bonanza for scammers, according to Adam Thomas, a malware researcher at Sunbelt Software. The film's blog has "such a high page ranking that they use that as sort of conduit to ... gain a really high Google page rank and hope that they can find some suckers to buy some medications online," he said.

The climatecrisis.net domain, which hosts the blog, is registered to Al Gore, the star of the 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Not all pages on the site appear to have been compromised, security experts say; just those associated with the blog.
H/T: ted

The Goracle, meanwhile, had his day at the White House.

UPDATE: Hot Air links. Thanks!

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