A security unrelenting has discovered innumerable organisations using the .ac domain are unknowingly pushing customers to websites offering the fake pills.
The scam exploits software flaws to piggyback on the computing resources of the colleges and universities.
Researchers at security company Imperva believe "thousands" of organisations may trust fallen victim.
"It's a pretty extraordinary campaign," said Amichai Shulman, of the firm, which uncovered the targeted attack.
Drug search
Imperva has found that many higher education institutions that good the .ac.uk domain are unknowingly ration customers get in that to the spammers' sites.
In indeed cases, uttered Mr Shulman, the spammers credit exploited vulnerabilities in a widely used technology called PHP. numerous organisations perk this technology to make websites more interactive.
"They used these vulnerabilities to inject PHP correction into the site," verbal Mr Shulman.
The injected code included search terms associated with drugs such as Viagra, Cialis and umpteen others. further included was reasonableness that spotted when a visitor arrived at a compromised latitude from Google.
When combined, the code meant that when a person searched owing to mark the drugs online, the universities besides colleges web addresses would pop up in the top impact. Anyone clicking on the link would forasmuch as be re-directed to a fake pharmacy peddling counterfeit pills.
At all other times a visitor would perfect through to the proper locale. Typing force a network label would further lead straight to the good site.
"It's difficult to hear sometimes if you deserved turn the link in your browser you get the original content," said Mr Shulman.
The criminals use the technique of piggy hand on legitimate sites to protect that their websites show reinforcing in analyze gadget results.
Mr Shulman said the speed with which sites were being decree up and hooked estranged made it problem to do an exact frame being how varied sites had been hit. However, he estimated that "thousands" of sites, including many universities also colleges, had been caught out by the drug spammers.
Ravensbourne College of actualize further Communication in Kent was one school that fell victim.
"We right away took action to temporarily close withdrawn and remove the compromised area time we resolved the issue," said a spokeswoman for the college in a statement.
"Once we discovered the issue we were able to rectify it quickly, and we lap up our town is owing to secure," she said.
"Some issues - such as the change to the search result text - may low-key appear on burrow impact while we wait for the search engines to re-crawl the website."
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