Grameen Bank web site hacked / infected with spam

The Grameen Bank is in the news today after one of its founders, Muhammad Yunus, was fired from it. You can see the news about it here.

Leaving the politics aside, what interested us is that their main web site is currently hacked and infected with blackhat SEO spam. We tried to contact them a few weeks ago about it, but got no reply (and the site remains hacked).

Even Google recently started to warn users about it with the following message: “This site may be compromised.” in the search results. Just search for “inurl:grameen.com” to verify it.

How they got hacked? They are using a very old version of Joomla, which is probably how the attackers were able to get in. Our malware / spam scanner also finds those issues, which is only displayed to crawlers (not to normal users), which is a common technique on blackhat seo to increase their page rank.

This is the result of our scanner: http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/?scan=http://www.grameen.com/.

This shows again the important of keeping your sites updated and always monitored.