Two Virginia.gov subdomains were hijacked for e-book scams

guest · May 9, 2020

Two Virginia.gov subdomains were hijacked for e-book scams
May 8, 2020
https://statescoop.com/two-virginia-gov-subdomains-were-hijacked-ebook-scams/

The Commonwealth of Virginia took down two old websites on Friday after discovering hackers had gained administrative access and attempted to turn them into scam e-book stores.

Dave Maass, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who discovered the hack, said it’s the latest known instance of a fairly common grift in which bad actors use the cover of legitimate-looking government websites for nefarious purposes.
According to Motherboard, which reported the news first, the hacked subdomains were vwn.virginia.gov and crc.virginia.gov, which were built in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

Maass speculated that those subdomains were likely spotted by a bot searching for outdated Nginx web server software.

“In the same way that government agencies often get ransomware attacks, it may not be because they’re the government, but because there is an exploit on the system that they’re using,” Maass told StateScoop.
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Motherbiard / Vice: Hackers Turned Virginia Government Websites Into Elaborate eBooks Scam Pages

“This discovery should trigger a top-to-bottom audit of its websites to determine whether the damage is widespread and whether there are other obsolete subdomains that ought to be archived and closed down.”

The Virginia government spokesperson said that’s exactly what they will do.

“The [Virginia Information Technology Agency] will undertake a full audit of the Virginia.gov domain to verify the hosting and content responsibilities across the platform,” the spokesperson said in an email.
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Two Virginia.gov subdomains were hijacked for e-book scams

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