Skip to content

Biting the hand that feeds IT

The Register ®

Security:


Related Whitepapers

Comments on ‘Government websites invaded by smut and spyware’

Redirection ruse used to peddle smut bazaars

Published Monday 8th October 2007 14:57 GMT

« Back to article page

Well at least they are hidden 

By Anonymous Coward
Posted Monday 8th October 2007 15:07 GMT
Coat

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.

Hackers? Surely you mean slackers? 

By amanfromMars
Posted Monday 8th October 2007 15:26 GMT

"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.

Omitted something... 

By Steven Hewittt
Posted Monday 8th October 2007 17:59 GMT
Coat

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...!

;-)

Doesn't matter .... 

By Kevin
Posted Tuesday 9th October 2007 00:35 GMT

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.

@Steven Hewitt 

By Pascal Monett
Posted Tuesday 9th October 2007 10:22 GMT

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 ?

whitepaper title

Server Consolidation and Containment

This paper discusses how consolidation and containment solutions with a virtual infrastructure meet the challenges of server sprawl and underutilization..
whitepaper title

Making Green IT a Reality

Customer Perspectives on the Impact of Storage Vendor Decisions on Power, Cooling, & Space in Enterprise Data Centers.

Top 20 storiesAll The Week’s HeadlinesArchiveSearch