Fergie's Tech Blog

USAID Server Hacked To Serve Pornography

Thomas Claburn writes on InformationWeek:

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provides economic, developmental and humanitarian assistance around the world in conjunction with the foreign policy goals of the United States. It also provides porn, or so it appeared as of 2:00 pm PST on Friday.

A call to USAID for comment found the agency unaware that one of its servers had been compromised. A few minutes later, a USAID spokesperson called back to say that the agency's IT staff was in the process of dealing with the issue. The hacked server was associated with USAID's Tanzania subdomain: Tanzania.usaid.gov.

This rather unorthodox offering was discovered by Sunbelt Software. As security researcher Patrick Jordan noted in a blog post on Friday, searching for porn using Google's "site:" operator (to restrict the search to the USAID domain) returned a list of apparent porn links.

posted by Fergie @ 11/30/2007 06:07:00 PM