BusinessWeek.com, which just last week publicly launched Business Exchange, a kind of social network for readers and industry leaders has been attacked by hackers and infected with code designed to deliver malware to readers.

Once compromised by such a server hole, the attack scripts could, in principle, launch anything desired by the attacker except currently included code for automatic attacks based on JavaScript. That means a visitor could be hit by malware just by landing on one of the pages, without even interacting in any way.

“Online security is a top priority and, while we continue to investigate the matter, we are confident that our readers’ personal information has not been compromised,” BusinessWeek spokesperson Patti Straus said.