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Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 November 2009 19.30 GMT
Hacking websites used to be a way to show off. Now, as Charles Arthur reports in our series about online security, it's a lucrative crime – committed on an industrial scale.
The email from Google in June was the first sign: it warned that the Free Our Data site seemed to be host to a set of hidden spam links – or as Google put it, "techniques that are outside our quality guidelines". It took more than two months to discover the true extent of the hacking, which had planted links all over the website to an "online pharmacy" selling dubious products.
More surprising, on digging into the problems, was the realisation that Free Our Data was only one of a network of sites that had been hit in a similar way by exploiting a subtle, hidden flaw. Others with similar spam links included the Montserrat Volcano observatory site, a European research site, a Minneapolis-based artist, an Australian website for singers, a recruiting company in California, the personal webspace of a maths professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio, and a medical devices website run by a large healthcare company.
A search for "/online/canadian" will certainly turn up hundreds more sites that have been compromised in the same way...
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/11/web-security-hacking
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