Hackers lace Web site with Viagra

Until recently—Tuesday, Aug. 1, to be exact—anyone who Googled the words “Chico” and “Viagra” would have gotten a surprise. The first Web site listed was the Chico Chamber of Commerce.

Ditto matching the words “chamber” and “commerce” with “Viagra,” or with “Cialis” or “Levitra,” for that matter. The chamber’s Web site, www.chicochamber.com, topped the list.

What was going on? Was somebody at the chamber running an online erectile-dysfunction pharmacy on the sly? Was the chamber trying to attract more hits so it could boast of them to city officials? (The city partially funds the site.) Was someone playing a joke on the chamber?

A close look at the chamber’s site showed that its source code contained hundreds of key words pertaining to ED drugs. By right-clicking on a white area of the home page, then clicking on “View Source,” one could access a text file containing source code for that page. About one-third of the way down the page was a large block of text containing all kinds of key words and links pertaining to ED drugs.

Here the mystery deepened. The links were all to pages on the site www.aldeer.com—as in www.aldeer.com/buy-viagra/viagra-online-discount.html. The site belongs to Alabama Deer Hunting.com, an online enterprise catering to, well, deer hunters in Alabama. The site proudly notes that it’s received 1,858,491 hits, but how many of them were deer hunters and how many horny geezers—or both—is hard to tell.

Adam Mitchell, a Web site maven who owns Q9 Design in Paradise, said his “plausible theory” was that the Viagra floggers were parasites who’d hacked the deer hunting site and set up some pages to which Google, Yahoo! and other search services sent prospective buyers.

“They found this site that was easy to hack and put up their pages to sell Viagra,” he said.

He noted that the aldeer.com links no longer worked, which suggested that the group had discovered and eliminated the parasitical pages. Alabama Deer Hunting.com gives no phone number, and it did not respond to an e-mail query.

The city allocated $125,685 to the chamber for business and visitor/tourism services, including operation of the Web site, in 2006-07. In its funding proposal, submitted in February, the chamber noted that in the previous fiscal year it “received 203,506 unique visits (representing more than 1.26 million pages viewed) to our community and visitor Web site, www.chicochamber.com.” How many of those visits were by hopeful erectile-dysfunction sufferers is impossible to know, of course.

“Who would type ‘Chico’ and ‘Viagra’ together?” asked Jim Goodwin, the chamber’s president. He’s got a point.

Most people consulted in reporting this story thought it was funny that the Chamber of Commerce was linked with a clandestine Viagra pusher, but Goodwin wasn’t one of them. “From our perspective, it’s not cute at all,” he said. “This is vandalism. It costs time and money to fix these problems.”

Alice Patterson is the chamber’s marketing director and oversees the Web site. “I realize some people could find humor in it, but it wasn’t funny to us,” she said. She took the opportunity to announce that the chamber was soon going to roll out a new, redesigned Web site.

She said she first noticed the hidden code Tuesday morning when she went onto the site management computer to make some changes. She immediately called the chamber’s technician, Cory Adams, with Rush Technical Services, and he had it cleaned out in a matter of minutes.

Adams cleared up one last mystery: Why the chamber’s site? Because it’s the kind of “dynamic site,” he said, that search spiders automatically seek out, and the more links those spiders find, the higher they will place a site on a search list.