MI5 website hack overhyped by Daily Express

by Graham Cluley on July 30, 2009 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Malware, Vulnerability

Apologies dear Clu-blog readers, as I've let you down.

Earlier today I blogged about an "exclusive" report in The Daily Express newspaper claiming that MI5's website had been compromised by hackers. (You can read that original blog post here).

Lucian Constantin, a news editor with Softpedia, has been in touch to shed some light on the story. It turns out that the Daily Express's story is both not an exclusive, and also not accurate.

Softpedia, for instance, reported on how hackers had demonstrated a proof-of-concept XSS attack on MI5's website over a week ago.

MI5 website demonstrating XSS vulnerability

What appears to have actually happened then is that a cross-site scripting weakness was found on MI5's website by Team Elite, who claim they informed the administrators of the website in advance.

So, Lucian suggests (and I agree with him), it appears that The Daily Express heard about the MI5 website flaw and then presented possible ways that the flaw could be exploited by hackers as fact.

Obviously it's not a good thing to have a XSS flaw on your website, but that's far removed from the Daily Express story which suggests that hackers had been able to steal information from site visitors or installed malware.

Thanks to Lucian for his help in getting to the bottom of this story.

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About the author

Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.