As the Mars Lander vehicle touched down on Mars last Sunday in search for signs of life, back home on Earth the news took down the Phoenix Mars Mission website earlier today after it was compromised and led visitors to an external website.

It was the blogs section of the website that was compromised as it was vulnerable to Injection flaws that led the hacker “VITAL” adding a main blog entry as shown below:

The compromise was acknowledged by the Phoenix Mars Mission officials. The website was taken offline and later brought online after resolving the flaw.

Injection flaws are quite common in web applications and it is no wonder that OWASP ranks it number two on the Top 10 web application vulnerabilities list.