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Pornjackers steal property site bandwidth

Big-time launch delay

A British property publishing house postponed its Web site launch for 15 months, on discovering 2GB of pornography had been dumped onto its server.

The company, Matching Hat, which launches a fully-firewalled propertyprices.co.uk today, spent those 15 months "fighting off repeated attacks from hackers", according to the Dotcom Telegraph.

Which seems like quite a long time to us.

Propertyprices had been, pre-launch, pornjacked. Crackers exploiting lax FTP security, insert porn material onto a site with a view to stealing bandwidth from their victims.

Corporate brochure sites are popular - overspecced and underused, the pornjacker's material can sit happily for months without the host noticing anything amiss.

Pornjacking is not uncommon: last year The Register uncovered a Danish porn parasite operating from within the site of Aopen.com, the Taiwanese-owned motherboard giant. We also know of a top ten UK computer reseller similarly afflicted, which discovered it had been pornjacked, only when it called in consultants to find out why its corporate Web site was running so slowly. ®

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