USAID reviews Web host after porn hack

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- The U.S. Agency for International Development is reviewing a Web-hosting contract after its server in Tanzania was hacked and pornographic pages were posted.

"As soon as we were alerted to the situation (on Friday afternoon), we took action," said a USAID official authorized to speak to the media. She said the offending pages had been taken down and that the whole server had been temporarily taken offline.

Anyone trying to visit tanzania.usaid.gov Monday was automatically redirected to the main USAID Web page for the country.

"This was a locally based server," said the official, "not part of our main network here in (Washington) D.C."

"We do have security standards written into all our (Web-hosting) contracts. … Those standards were broken in this case … and we are reviewing the contract." She said it had been awarded by the USAID mission in Tanzania but had no further details.

The hacked pages, with titles like "free teen porn clip download" designed to attract casual porn-browsers, were so-called come-on sites, according to security specialists from Sunbelt Software who blogged about the incident over the weekend.

They said the pages redirected anyone who tried to visit them to another page, which would try and load a Trojan horse program on their computer.

Such programs are used by cyber-crime gangs to steal passwords or recruit infected computers for so-called botnets, networks of compromised PCs that -- often unknown to their owners -- can be used to take part in Internet attacks and other forms of cyber crime.

USAID is not alone among .gov Web sites in being hacked in this way. Earlier this year, according to e-Week.com, the Marin County Transportation Authority fired its Web-hosting contractor after hackers compromised the agency's site and caused the whole gov.ca domain to be taken temporarily offline.

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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor