On the El Mundo website, we have an article with a headline that says: “Mr. Bean ‘sneaks in’ to the official website of the Spanish presidency“.
This article, without a doubt, is an example of the lack of rigor, and technological “yellow journalism” that floods us.
There is only one paragraph in that article that is saved, for being “real”, and that is the one about the cost of the website.
“Mr. Bean”, the well-known humor character played by British actor Rowan Atkinson, has sneaked into the website of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union.”
He has not “sneaked in”, he can be shown, just as any image (and more things) can be shown embedded in the search page of that website, by modifying the search parameters. This is a simple error (but not unimportant) XSS.
The “hackers” managed to bypass the security systems of the Spanish Presidency website on Monday, block the page and place an image of Mr. Bean, smiling, with eyes wide open and with a surprised face, greeting with a “Hi there” (“Hello to all”, in colloquial English).
Page blocked by this XSS? That is absolutely impossible. If it went down, it is due to a capacity problem and that has nothing to do with it. Bypass the security systems?. It seems that today, and we are grown-ups, no one looks at the url where Mr. Bean is shown. By not paying attention, in the end what happens happens, and we end up giving our data on websites that imitate our bank (Phishing) and similar.
Sources in charge of the development of the website confirmed that they had problems but that they were already working on solving it and that security systems were being modified, although they did not recognize that Mr Bean had “sneaked into” the website.
Problems, if it went down, obviously they have had them, but that “did not recognize” seems taken from a heart program, where not affirming that there has been a security problem and data modification (non-existent) is “not recognizing it”.
The image of Mr. Bean was not on the website for long, although long enough for social networks, such as Twitter, to echo this security failure of the website and the “prank” of internet users.
It would be there as long as the site where it was hosted continued to show it.
It is sad that important security issues are not treated correctly by the media, and become a great sink of disinformation, where nothing is what it seems, but it seems that everything is a world.
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