February 22, 2023 –
The Fotomuseum Winterthur was the victim of a strange cyber attack: junk goods are currently being advertised in Asian characters in the search results.
The Fotomuseum Winterthur reports a cyber attack on its website. If you look at current search engine results for the museum, you will also see entries with Asian characters (see image). In the smuggled texts according to a report advertised junk goods and counterfeits by “Tagesanzeiger”. According to the museum management, only the title and the meta description of the website are affected, customer data has been completely spared. Furthermore, website visitors with strict network settings are currently no longer able to access the site at all for security reasons.
The National Center for Cyber Security (NCSC) assumes that the attack was not politically motivated, but that there is a purely commercial motivation behind the attack. The strategy used is referred to as “Japanese Keyword Hack” or “Japanese SEO Spam” and is, as the name suggests, a dishonest means of search engine optimization for Asian shops that sell cheap goods.
It has not been fully clarified how the attackers got into the website backend; there has only been one comparable case in Switzerland from December 2022. It is assumed that vulnerabilities in content management systems (CMS) that have not been updated are usually the gateway for this type of attack. The Fotomuseum Winterthur is currently working on solving the problem. (win)
