Fergie's Tech Blog

Hacker Redirects Barack Obama's Site to HillaryClinton.com

Via Netcraft.

A security weakness in Barack Obama's website has been exploited to redirect visitors to Hillary Clinton's website. Visitors who viewed the Community Blogs section of the site were instead presented with Clinton's website as a result of a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

A user named Mox, from Liverpool, IL, posted an apparent confession in the Community Blogs section on the Barack Obama website yesterday. The subject of the post was, "I am the one who "hacked" Obamas site."

Mox plays down the matter by saying that all he did was exploit some poorly written HTML code before suggesting that it was a cross-site scripting vulnerability that had been exploited. By allowing users to enter characters such as > and " into their blog URLs, JavaScript could be injected into pages in the Community Blogs section and would be executed by subsequent visitors.

posted by Fergie @ 4/21/2008 11:37:00 AM