April 21st, 2008
Obama site hacked; Redirected to Hillary Clinton
With a day to go before a critical Pennsylvania Democratic primary, Barack Obama’s team has been busy patching security holes.
According to Netcraft, a hacker exploited security flaws in Obama’s site to redirect traffic to Hillary Clinton’s site. Anyone that visited Obama’s community blogs section of the site was sent to Clinton.
Someone named Mox confessed to the hack in an Obama community blog:
First, let me explain why I put hacked in quotation marks. It is because e what I did was not hacking in the sense that I burrowed into some dusty served and changed the Obama site and stole all your credit card numbers. All I did was exploit some poorly written HTML code.
So, you may be wondering, I never saw this hacking! Well, apparently someone videotaped it. http://youtube.com/watch?v=NKjomr1Afq0. You may also be wondering, how did you get Hillary’s site to appear where Obama’s should be. The answer to that is, through the magical world of Cross Site Scripting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting.
You might be wondering, how did you get xss to work here? First, go to your manage blog tab. Then go to Edit Settings. You see how you can put anything you want as a blog URL? Well, its fixed now, but before you could put in any characters you wanted. Including >, “, and
Here’s the YouTube demonstration via YouTube. Also see XSSed and Computerworld.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
