14 DAY TRIAL // Do you want to buy some medicines? Maybe a pill of Viagra at the lowest price on the market? Or maybe some Valium? All you need to do is to visit Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" film blog and you might find some unexpected goodies (not!). Robert McMillan of IDG News Service reported that the blog was hacked a few days ago, the attackers publishing tons of links to other websites selling Viagra, Xanax, Valium and some other drugs. Just like a spam method, the attackers tried to drive traffic to their website but what's more important and dangerous in the same time - they may have managed to get a higher position in the search engine results. This would obviously bring more users searching for certain keywords, as it's well known the fact that top search engines such as Google and Yahoo drive a huge traffic to webpages.
Since high-rated websites such as Al Gore's film blog includes links to other pages, their PageRank is automatically increased due to search engine's algorithms which analyze the number of backlinks for every single site.
Getting back to the hack, it seems that the entire exploit was conducted through a WordPress vulnerability, the blog publishing technology implemented on "An Inconvenient Truth".
What's interesting about this hack is that the weblinks to the Viagra websites were not visible to the visitors because they were implemented only to affect the search engine rankings. According to the same source, the hidden links could have been analyzed by the crawlers but the visitors couldn't have accessed them unless they opened the page source.
But there's also a good thing about this hack: there's no virus, worm, Trojan horse or any other infection published on the website, although the hackers could have inserted a dangerous code pretty easy since they got access to the content.