Barack Obama Website Hacked to Send Visitors to Hillary Clinton’s Site   4/28/2008 - 950 views,

The self-confessed culprit of these shenanigans, “Mox”, from Liverpool, IL, used to his advantage the lax coding of the Obama site developers, a laxity that permitted his user-injected Javascript to be executed. It’s a little like walking around a bookstore, switching hardback dustcovers; childish, time-consuming and ultimately a frustration and annoyance for victims. While this time it was merely a foolish prank, these cross-site scripting vulnerabilities can leave users open to cyber-attack from phishers and virus planters. All site developers should be considering safety and security as first order design objectives when putting together web site requirements; that the Obama site developers were not, when anyone with two functioning neurons would predict that a high-volume, high-visibility site in a potentially contentious political battle to seek the presidency would very likely be the subject of attack at some time.

Luckily, for those of you who use Firefox and Firefox-based browsers to view the web, you have a robust and flexible defense against these insecurities; the Noscript extension. This provides a powerful protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, and no Firefox user should be without it.