Cyber-Terrorists Spam the Eco-Terrorists

Was the Earth Liberation Front Web Site Hacked by Viagra?

March 3, 2008 at 12:01PM by Dan Shapley | comment

Have cyber-terrorists attacked the eco-terrorists?

It appears so, based on a look at the Earth Liberation Front Web site, which should be getting a lot of traffic today after the group was implicated in the arson of a luxury Street of Dreams housing development near Seattle.

The apparently authentic Earth Liberation Front Web sites appear to be a mix of content about eco-terrorism and Viagra.

The meta title of the homepage is even "Viagra Sample Pack - Free Viagra Sample," which could reflect some misguided attempt to capture Web traffic from poor old men most likely uninterested in radical environmental terrorism. The "links" navigation at the top of the page links directly to a full-page Viagra ad, and there are Viagra ads all over the site.

But it doesn't appear to be purely a front site put out by some illicit Viagra purveyor. It's a fairly deep site with believable content about the organization, which is a loosely affiliated group of like-minded individuals hell-bent on bringing down environmentally destructive capitalistic business. Because the group is so shadowy, it's not hard to imagine oversight of the Web page being lax enough to allow for some effective hacking. It's not hard to imagine a sneaky Viagra salesman buying the domain name and content after the site was abandoned.

The domain appears to be for sale, but that doesn't explain who is maintaining the site now.

The ELF press office is, according to the Wikipedia page on the organization, defunct. The Daily Green has contacted the Web site seeking information. But that might well just result in a flood of erectile dysfunction spam.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Earth Liberation Front Web page screenshot
Earth Liberation Front home page

Update: This curious state of the ELF Web site had previously been noted by Christopher Trottier in a March 2007 post, Spammers Masquerading as Eco-Terrorists, to his blog quixoticals.

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