The hacked websites, which include primary schools, universities, the Driving Standards Association and various local government websites, such the Historic Scotland heritage site, have fallen victim to hackers exploiting loopholes in badly designed software.
The websites were affected in different ways. Some contained inappropriate links on their home pages and others in different sections of their sites. Cardiff High School, for example, contained links to porn sites in the ‘calendar’ section of its website two weeks ago, when the research was conducted
According to Backup Technology and digital agency, Branded 3, who jointly collated the research, the hackers are motivated by the money they can earn from porn sites by boosting their traffic.
They also direct people to these illicit sites, which are claiming to sell products such as Viagra and hardcore pornography, in order to install viruses or ‘malware’ (bad software) on people’s computers so they can raid people’s personal details. This is usually with the intention of stealing money.
The research found over 30 school and university websites’ domain names, ending “ac.uk”, had been infected with content that could direct children away from the safety of a school site to a third party site owned by the hacker. By typing into Google’s search engine, “inurl:ac.uk” in order to limit the search to British education websites and then adding a phrase such as “buy viagra”, web users will be able to see which sites have been hacked.
The problem was also present with government websites ending “.gov.uk”, which are usually trusted web addresses.
The damage done by the hackers can be seen on Google search results pages showing government websites and university websites hacked to sell viagra.
Patrick Altoft, director of search at Branded 3, told The Telegraph: “We are still considering what to do with the information we have come across. We intend to inform the affected parties imminently. However, the problem for many of these sites is that there won’t be a quick fix. They will need to run an audit of the security software used by their site and then reinstall new software that is more secure.”
“We also spotted many of the schools were using the same software, making it easier for hackers to target multiple sites. This was the same scenario with many government sites.”
A Google spokesperson said: “It’s unfortunately not uncommon for sites to be maliciously modified without the webmaster’s knowledge, and all webmasters should remain vigilant about security. Any spam pages are automatically demoted in Google’s ranking. In addition, we have a partnership with StopBadware.org, which fights against malicious software, and if we become aware of anything hosted on a webpage that may harm a user’s computer then we display a warning before the user can access the site.”
A Cardiff High School spokesperson: “We spotted the work of the hacking very quickly and put security measures in place. It hadn’t happened before or since.”
A Government spokesperson from the Home Office said: “It is government policy neither to confirm nor deny if an individual organisation has been the subject of an attack nor to speculate on the possible origins of such attacks.”
The Home Office came under fire in April 2009 after a link on its website directed users to a Japanese pornographic site.
