Senate candidate Nick Carter's website hacked for Viagra

(UPDATE: 10/22 Carter's site has been fixed, sometime between yesterday and today.)

U.S. Senate candidate Nick Carter wants to improve U.S. health care, but contrary to appearances, providing universal access to $1 Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra isn't part of his plan.

According to Google search results, Nick Carter's campaign web site is entitled "1 cheap dollar viagra 100 mg viagra prices 1 cialis levitra sales."That's not a campaign strategy.

Apparently, a good while back, a hacker, hoping to boost their online Viainserted more than 1,200 lines of malicious coding in the landing page of Carter's website (nickforsenate.com/index.html), with the aim of boosting an online pharmaceutical operation.

Looking at Carter's web page in your browser, you might think I'm making this stuff up - and perhaps by the time you've read this, the Carter campaign will have removed the junk. (I told them about the problem on Saturday.) But as of this writing, the page contains more than 1,000 hidden links promoting male enhancement medications.

In fact, some 191,300 characters of the 196,700 that make up the webpage shouldn't be there.

The malicious coding isn't visible when you view the page in your web browser because it's been coded to be hidden from view. That's why no one - Carter campaign and their website provider, Blue Utopia included - noticed when it happened. The code was placed on the page at least a month or so ago. Who knows how many site visitors were scared off by the screwy descriptions.

The technique is nothing new. In fact, about a year ago, a highly similar attack was made on a website belonging to former Vice President Al Gore.

Usually, the point of inserting the code is to boost traffic to a given web page, and thus, in theory, boost sales of a site's under-the-counter pharmaceuticals.

Search engines like Google read the full code contained in a web page (such as what's pictured at right) - not just what an Internet surfer sees in their browsers. Therefore, links, whether viewable or not, can be used to temporarily increase a site's credibility.

Whenever you link to a webpage, (such as the Powell Tribune's), you're telling Google, Yahoo, and all the other search engines that the site you're linking to has value and relevance.

Generally, the more links a page has, the higher it will rank on search engine results pages, and that helps drive web surfers to the page. Hacking, of course, is a cheater's way of boosting traffic and revenue.

However, in this case, the hackers appear to have been utterly incompetent in that regard. They succeeded in adding links to 1,203 webpages in Carter's coding, but all of those links point to abandoned pages buried deep on Carnegie Mellon's web site that hold no opportunities to purchase Viagra (here's an example).

Whoever added the coding will probably remain a mystery, but it's highly unlikely that the attack was launched by a political opponent or, for that matter, anyone in the U.S.

It's similarly unlikely that the coding was a desperate attempt to draw over-50 voters from incumbent U.S. Senator John Barrasso's side.