

UK Government Websites Spewing Spam - choult
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2014/03/the-unsecured-state-part-4-uk-government-websites-spewing-spam/

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kjjw
This is a fantastic anology for what is happening to the fabric of British
society as the current government guts 20-30% from the budget of every public
service.

It is interesting to contrast this situation with the influx of pay-day
lenders offering APR in the 1000's % for small loans, while the government
performs a complete dismantle of the welfare state under the cover of fiscal
responsibility.

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UVB-76
On the contrary, the fact sites like this exist is an indication public funds
have been wasted on unnecessary, poorly implemented IT projects. Not that this
is surprising.

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rahimnathwani
This sounds like a sales opportunity for WPEngine or Flywheel.

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cognivore
Economic stimulus by the government that actually works?

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polymatter
Perhaps these sites should never have been setup. If they were valuable,
someone would have noticed they had been attacked and would do something about
it.

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belorn
From a webhosting perspective, few people ever notice when their site has been
attacked.

To a degree, this is by intention of those doing the attacking. They would
rather have the site up and running, while the spam, code injection and
backdoor can sit there earning them money. It's not until the spam causes
damage (or is visible enough) that someone calls someone who is in charge, who
in turn might hire a web developer, who in turn calls the hosting company in
order to figure out that a 5 year old WordPress site that someone else put
together has not been updated. Then it can take even longer until the new web
developers has negotiated a price to fix the situation.

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notahacker
Plus the less extreme examples were comment spam, which is present on the vast
majority of commercial sites generating millions, simply because the cost of
removing or effectively filtering the spam exceeds the damage done by the spam
(especially spam in the form of polite comments about how lovely the website
is).

Members of the public would have to look pretty hard to find the majority of
these issues: they generally don't view source code and and even if they
searched kidwelly.gov.uk for viagra the spam pages aren't indexed.

