An online security repository of bad links has recently flagged the official website of the Department of Agriculture (Kagawaran ng Pagsasaka), which is owned and maintained by the Philippine government, as harbouring malware.
We have determined that six pages, including the default page, have been injected with a Blackhat SEO spam code. Below is a list of other infected pages:
- “Contact Us” page
- “Advisory Banner” page
- “About Us” page
- Department Mission/Vision page
- History of DA page
Below is a screenshot of the code we found:
Take note, dear Reader, that visiting the above infected pages will not get you infected; however, you will be contributing to the increase of the page rank of the gambling-related URL we can see in the code.
We have reason to believe that the DA site has been hacked because of the presence of the injected code. Readers are advised to avoid accessing the website entirely until the administrators are able to remove the code and make sure that it’s safe to visit.
Malwarebytes has already reported the infection to the DA.
Jovi Umawing
Hello, PureBlue90 🙂 The presence of Trojan code on a website does not necessarily mean that visitors can or will be infected. In this case, several pages in the DA domain are indeed infected with a Blackhat SEO Spam code, code that is benign/harmless to users. However, this shouldn’t encourage anyone to check out the website since doing so increases the page ranking of a gambling website (see screenshot on blog). Please refrain from visiting the DA site for now.