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back to article Government websites invaded by smut and spyware

A slew of government organisations and corporations are unwittingly helping hackers promote porn sites. Targets as diverse as the Marin County Transportation Authority website in California and the Bank of Ghana have been unwittingly playing host to code that redirects surfers to smut as a result of insecure systems. The …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Well at least they are hidden

    Verisign have a completely open redirector on their website:

    http://search.verisign.com/cs.html?url=http://www.bbc.co.uk

    http://search.verisign.com/cs.html?url=http://www.theregister.co.uk

    I've had quite a bit of spam using it... they don't seem to give a shit.

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  2. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Hackers? Surely you mean slackers?

    "A slew of government organisations and corporations are unwittingly helping hackers promote porn sites."

    And it has got absolutely nothing to do with a slew of government organisations and corporations members cruising for porn sites on government and corporation computers, of course.

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  3. Steven Hewittt
    Coat

    Omitted something...

    I love way that the OS and web server of choice is omitted. Not that it may be an OS or web server problem at all (could be a number of things), but if they were using MS products I very much doubt that this key bit of info would be missing from the report...!

    ;-)

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  4. Kevin

    Doesn't matter ....

    Doesn't matter what the OS and Server of choice is here, since most companies/individuals have no control over the server and OS powering the server.

    The malware in question being served by the hijacked server is targeting Windows machines.

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  5. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    @Steven Hewitt

    We're talking government servers here, and not on a Federal level either. You really think they use Linux ? Or Sun ?

    And if Kevin is right, it has to be Windows servers because the malware wouldn't work on anything else.

    Besides, anything to do with a bank is most likely made to be IE-compatible, and once again we're talking mainly Windows.

    Ah, conspiracists. Anything is good to get a new theory running, eh ?

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