Hacking News

WhiteHouse.org Hacked

Yet another website serving malware to its visitors

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

20th of May 2008, 13:14 GMT

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WhiteHouse.org, the officious website of president George W. Bush, was hacked a few days ago by someone who inserted a malicious code able to drop malware on

visitors' computers. The website does not belong to George W. Bush and is actually a parody meant to make fun of some presidential matters. The real and the official website of the White House is whitehouse.gov, hosted on a domain assigned to the US government, but it seems like many users still confound it with the parody page.

"Joining the growing list of Web site compromises is whitehouse.org, the "officious" parody site of current U.S. White House administration, and all the colorful punditry that accompanies it," security company Trend Micro warned. "Whitehouse.org has been compromised to harbor some malicious, obfuscated JavaScript code which "background downloads" code to unsuspecting visitors of the site, where a malicious file is downloaded (which is detected by Trend Micro as TROJ_DELF.GKP )."

As usual, you're advised to keep your anti-virus solution up to date with the latest virus definitions and avoid visiting websites or download files which look suspicious. In addition, forget to apply the newest updates for your operating system because some pieces of malware distributed through compromised websites target unpatched vulnerabilities discovered on visitors' computers.

Similar attacks occur every once in a while and even if hackers manage to compromise a new website, it is extremely important to fix the problems as soon as possible or, at least, to take the page down to minimize the damages of the attack. Sometimes, such an infiltration could have serious damages and not necessarily to the data stored on the computer but straight to the human being in front of the monitor. A few weeks ago, for instance, some hackers broke into the website belonging to the Epilepsy Foundation, placing flashing images all over the it, photos which caused serious seizures to visitors.

TAGS:

security | whitehouse.org | hack | malware

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