With Christmas fast approaching, Santa Claus reached out for a little help from Stopbadware.org this week.

The consumer advocacy group said it was approached by an Incline Village, Nevada, man who had legally changed his name to Santa Claus, who asked them to help figure out why his Web site was being flagged by Google's Web site filters.

It turned out that Santa's Web site had been hacked.

On Friday, the Web site was still downloading malicious software, according to Roger Thompson, chief technology officer with Exploit Prevention Labs. It exploits a bug in Internet Explorer that Microsoft  patched last August, meaning that people running older versions of the browser could be at risk, Thompson said via instant message.

"The site is hacked," he said. "If you are not patched, it uses an exploit to silently install a huge amount of adware and spyware."

The original problem was soon resolved by Stopbadware.org, but on Friday malware had again cropped up on the Web site.