Fergie's Tech Blog

National Government Servers Hosting Phishing Sites

Nick Sullivan writes on the Symantec Security Response Blog:

In recent months, Symantec has detected a number of phishing sites that have been hosted on government URLs. In June alone, phishing sites were identified on government sites from the following countries: Thailand (.go.th), Indonesia (.go.id), Hungary (.gov.hu), Bangladesh (.gov.bd), Argentina (.gov.ar), Sri Lanka (.gov.lk), Ukraine (.gov.ua), China (.gov.cn), Brazil (.gov.br), Bosnia and Herzegovina (.gov.ba), Columbia (.gov.co), and Malaysia (.gov.my).

This might come as a surprise to some people, as governments are thought to have very secure computer systems. However, the quantity of phishing sites hosted on government domains around the world seems to suggest otherwise.

More here.

Note: While this is not really news to anyone working in the security industry, it may indeed be news to others outside of those circles. It does, however, illustrate that the state of website security is amazingly poor these days, and websites that appear to be "official" are not immune to compromise if they implemented poorly and/or insecurely. - ferg

posted by Fergie @ 7/12/2007 11:48:00 AM