Friday, September 19, 2008
AARP has been subjected to a mass botnet campaign to spread pornographic content, MX Logic has found.
Jeremy Yoder, director of Internet properties at the security firm, told Darkreading.com that the hackers behind the network security breach were probably employed by porn promoters keen to push their websites up in search engine rankings.
After identifying coding flaws in the profile function on the website, the hackers were able to dump links and javascript redirect commands on the site.
They then launched a large scale botnet campaign which inundated the membership organization's messageboards with links to the porn sites.
Yoder warned: "There has been a considerable increase in the use of comment and profile spam to promote pornographic or phishing sites in search engines."
He added that while some users were automatically redirected to the porn sites, the presence of static links that could be easily avoided were a tell-tale sign that the hackers were trying to push the sites up in search engines by piggybacking on the strength of the AARP's own rankings.
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