Someone published a bunch of spam posts about marijuana, video games, and beauty products, on an official site of the US Department of Agriculture.The pages were on the site for the USDA’s Office of Operations, which manages the department’s building complex, and have titles like “How To Germinate Medical Marijuana Seeds,” “Marijuana Dispensaries In La,” “New 'Battlefield 4' Game Modes Leaked,” and “Five Things to Remember Before You Order Viagra Online”—all content that does not look like it belongs on a government website given that it has poor grammar, and appears to promote various products.
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Those pages were still online as of Wednesday morning.A USDA spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Motherboard that “a web form on the website was spammed.”“The web form has been disabled and the content in question is being removed,” the statement read.
A screenshot of one of the spam posts. (Image: Motherboard)
The editor of the cannabis news outlet Marijuana Moment Tom Angell flagged some of the unusual-looking pages on Twitter on Wednesday.The spam pages are hosted on a part of the USDA website that appears to run a Drupal content management system, according to a quick analysis of the page. All the posts appear to be part of a series called “Thought Of The Week.”
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