21 January 2008, 19:45

Perl.com apparently hacked

Recent visitors to the Perl.com website were redirected to a suspect search service focusing on erotic services. Adbaaz.com, the operator of the service, is located in Kingstown on the island of St. Vincent. The Perl.com domain is still registered to a company owned by Tom Christiansen, one of the best known developers of the Pearl programming language.

Perl.com belongs to the O'Reilly publishing network, which also owns the rights to the Perl logo. The website bills itself as "The official Perl homepage", a title for which it competes with Perl.org. The legal owners of the web site have not been available for comment.

The JavaScript responsible for the redirect was hosted at http://grepblogs.net/adx.js and pointed to Perl.com – from there it directed to adbaaz.com. Affected users could safely continue to use Perl.com with JavaScript disabled. The redirect has however now been removed and the site is operating normally again.

(mba)

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