14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, a Reddit user reported that an official website of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) redirected visitors to advertisements and malware pages. The website hasn’t been hacked, but a clever cybercriminal abused a typo in the code.
A total of over 800 pages have been impacted.
“An internal coding error has caused an incorrect re-direct on some pages on NHS Choices since Sunday evening. Routine security checks alerted us to this problem on Monday morning at which point we identified the problem and corrected the code,” NHS Choices stated.
“NHS Choices have updated the affected cached pages to ensure that the code on all affected pages is amended and expect this to be completed this afternoon. We can confirm that this problem has arisen due to an internal coding error and that NHS Choices has not been maliciously attacked.”
An NHS Choices spokesperson has provided The Guardian with additional information regarding the incident. It turns out that, last year, while working on the website, a developer accidentally wrote “translate.googleaspis.com” instead of “translate.googleapis.com.”
Someone reportedly based in the Czech Republic noticed the mistake and registered the googleaspis.com domain. This allowed him to redirect the site’s visitors to ads and malware.
Some Reddit users have wondered if the developer who made the mistake is not “in cahoots” with the individual who registered the site, but others have pointed out that the malicious actor might have simply searched the NHS website for security holes.
While it’s a good thing that the NHS.uk website hasn’t been hacked, some people are displeased with the fact that NHS Choices hasn’t apologized for the incident.