Week 6: Security Hacking Story

I did some research and found out that Al Gores WordPress blog had been hacked a while back during the time when his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary came out.

The hackers really didn’t hurt the blog though or steal any information. A popular thing that some companies are doing in order to boost their page rank for their own websites is to hack a highly ranked page put in some back links to their website and voila they get a higher page rank since someone linked to them, even better when the person that is linking to them has a really high page rank themselves, just like Al Gores blog did.

So, there it was on Al Gores blog, several links to a bunch of different pharmaceuticals, brand names such as Viagra and buy Valium online. I guess most users weren’t able to even see these links though, they were just inside the source code. Luckily though the whole website wasnt hacked only the blog section.

The details on how they did it were not very specific. They said that the hackers were using an exploit that is known to be used on the WordPress blogging software this flaw is how they were able to hack inside of his blog and add some spam links to their site.