Pharmacy Spam Blogs At U.S. Nuclear Safety Lab

The Web site for the institution charged with safeguarding the safety and integrity of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has been inadvertently hosting advertisements and blogs that link to illegal prescription drug sites hawking everything from generic painkillers to erectile dysfunction medication, Security Fix has learned.

Dozens of pages belonging to the official Web site of Lawrence Livermore National Labs appear to have been seeded with the unauthorized advertisements. Beneath each of the full-page ads were a series of blog entries that featured a bizarre mixture of information, including what appears to be ill-translated gibberish interspersed with information that is actually relevant to the advertised drugs.

Security Fix located the pharmacy spam pages by conducting a series of simple Google searches, such as this one.

The sites are all now inactive, and it's not entirely clear how long they were up. According to the oldest date on the time-stamped blog entries, the attackers first began planting the ads and blog posts as early as March 2007.

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Brian Krebs on Computer Security. The Washington Post Company