Democrat’s Clint Curtis, who is running against Republican Rep. Michael Waltz in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, said last week that a Google search involving his website led users to the wrong website that sells Viagra.
He has the Google links to his law firm and election campaign hacked, which redirected all traffic Thursday morning to a site advertising Viagra pills and other erectile dysfunction medications, such as Cialis and Levitra.
The 62-year-old attorney, who is also a computer programmer and ex-employee of NASA and ExxonMobil, was upset and amused. He suggested that his campaign must be making people nervous enough to derail it through such efforts.
He said, “You don’t hack Google very easily.”
On Thursday, the Google media office said that the problem was not on their end.
The Google media office said in a text to Florida Politics, “Google does not host the site, so you’ll have to check with the campaign about its host. And follow up with the correct site host for more info on the situation.”
However, Curtis checked with his host site and he still thinks it is Google. He said, “It would appear Google is where we were hacked because all the other sites work.”
Direct use of Curtis’s law firm web address clintcurtis.com and his campaign address clintcurtis4congress.com worked correctly Thursday. Even searches through other search engines – such as Bing and Yahoo – also provided listings that led to his official sites. However, there was one featured listing on Microsoft Bing that routed to Viagra.
On Thursday morning, if someone searched for Clint Curtis on Google and clicked on the links, they got ads for Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra pills.
Curtis went on to say he has been getting calls from people who wanted information about his candidacy and campaign but they were frustrated after being offered erectile dysfunction pills instead. The Democrat said he tried to contact Google about the hack, but he had not gotten any response from the company.
