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Al Gore's Blog Hacked

by Tim Stevens on November 27, 2007 at 09:59 AM



Al Gore's blog -- in which the former presidential candidate-turned-celebrity environmentalist posts updates on global warming and the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' -- has been hacked. But it's likely you'd never know it by looking at the thing.

That's because most of the hack work is hidden. The hackers in this case gained access to the site through a security hole, then inserted hidden links into the blog posts. To see them, check out our gallery of screens below. Hidden in the source code of the site, we found link after link pointing to drugs like Xanax, Viagra, Tramadol, and just about any other drug you can think of. Not terribly riveting, we know, but we just wanted to offer you some proof.

So what's the point of hidden links that you can't see? The answer lies in the results you get on search engines like Google. By hijacking a very popular site like Al Gore's, the hackers can get their own pages more prominently placed in search results on Google. That's because these links can be seen by Google's crawler, which runs through the hidden code of Web pages to figure out where to direct you should you search for something like, say, Xanax. Since these links appear in a very prominent page, in this case Gore's blog, Google's engine thinks they are important, so people who later search for Xanax in Google might very well be redirected to the hacker's Web site over another.

Interestingly, the links point to another site that also seems to have been hacked, making this literal web of intrigue a bit thicker. Don't worry, it's nothing to fear on your end as far as security or viruses are concerened. It's also doubtful that the guilty party will ever be caught, but we're hoping that Al calls his system administrator in short order and gets those links removed. This kind of pollution, at least, is easily cleaned. Unfortunately, right now, some poor chump is probably buying Viagra from the company that employed these hackers to give them Google search prominence.

Al Gore Hacked



From PC World

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Tags: Al Gore, AlGore, elections, Global Warming, GlobalWarming, Inconvenient Truth, InconvenientTruth, politics, security

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