Al Gore Website Hacked

November 27, 2007 5:41 a.m. EST

New York (AHN) - The website of former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore was infiltrated by hackers. The hacking targeted Gore's blog, which aimed to promote the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The page has been altered to host links to websites featuring online pharmaceuticals.

The links, which featured titles such as "Xanax On Line", "Viagra" and "Buy Valium Online" were believed by officials to have been intended to increase traffic for websites that are actually selling the drugs.

The hacking seemed to have only been limited to the blog on the website, and was suspected to have been feeding off the page's large traffic to bump their websites up in search engine results, which are determined by the number of hits gained by the hosting website.

Sunbelt Software malware researcher Adam Thomas, the hackers targeted Gore's blog because it had "such a high page ranking that they use that as a sort of conduit to...gain a really high Google page rank, and hope that they find some suckers to buy some medications online."

PC Online reported that by Monday, the links could not be found on the page, but were visible on its source code. The links led to a website being run by Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.

Neither representatives of Al Gore, nor those of Westmont College, gave comments.

Hackers have been gaining ground recently, as the New York Times reported that they managed to obtain access to the private email accounts of thousands of donors to a total of 92 charities, including CARE and the American Museum of Natural History.

Investigations are still on-going regarding the matter.