Obama's Website Hacked: People Re-directed to HillaryClinton.com

Obama's Website HACKED! Laptops stolen from campaign office! (UPDATED w/video)
by dawnt
Sat Apr 19, 2008 at 09:44:19 PM PDT
UPDATE II:I think they have fixed it. The links are working / not working intermittently are working. Also, watch the video if you had trouble finding the redirects. I received several reports and had trouble finding the correct blogs, so it also took me a while to verify it while it was actually happening.

Someone hacked the MyBO website!Several links were redirecting to Hillary's website instead of going to the intended pages within MyBO (MyBO is my.barackobama.com).

While the site was hijacked, if you went from the Dashboard (which, again, worked fine) to the "Community Blogs" section, you would have gotten redirected to Hillary's website from some of the links within the website. Also, if you had clicked on "My Blog" and then "View All Blogs," it would have taken you to Hillary's website.

At this time, I believe all of the redirects have been fixed. Although, if anyone sees more, post them in the comments. Follow me after the jump for more...

dawnt's diary :: ::
Lots of others are also reporting having the same problems. I actually first heard about it via an email earlier but didn't click on the right link, so I thought it was not true. After getting several more emails, I went back and meticulously looked for the exact links that people were complaining about. Sure enough, the problem was there.

This is all over the blogs, email lists, and groups now. Some others have posted verifying this in the comments below and also in the current open thread.

I've been looking at this, and I'm going to make a guess about the situation. I bet they are not sanitizing the input fields. Someone knowledgeable about web security probably managed to sneak in redirect code, which would send the user not to the link they wanted to go to, but to another link altogether. If I'm right, this is considered hacking and hijacking!

Ok, here's the video:

The most notable link was from the MyBO Dashboard page (note, the Dashboard page itself was working fine throughout the entire ordeal):


Video was provided courtesy of Zennie's blog, a friend of mine also who diaried this topic at his blog.

My friend Zennie, in the video, postulates that perhaps Clinton's campaign and/or staff may be behind the hijacking. I think it's possible, but we'll never prove it if she is. More likely, in my humble opinion, is that some overzealous supporter with a little tech knowledge and too much time on his hands (probably living in his mother's basement) was behind this.

UPDATE III: In other breaking news, according to the Baltimore Sun, the campaign office in Allentown was broken into, and the culprits took laptops and cell phones:

An Obama aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "a couple" field laptops were taken out of the office at 1233 Linden St. The computers have demographic information that the campaign uses to target voters. "A couple" cell phones were also taken, the aide said.