Wouldn’t you think Al Gore would have better online security?

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.
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Once they gained access to the site, criminals could have easily added malicious exploit code to the blog, and that code could have been used to infect visitors’ PCs with computer viruses, said Roger Thompson, CTO of Exploit Prevention Labs. “It just shows how tricky it is to secure a Web site,” he said. “I think we’re a bit lucky it’s not shooting exploits.”

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