Poisoned websites attack visitors
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Many small web shops have become unwitting hosts for malicious code that attacks Windows PCs that visit.
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Web site visitors who clicked on banner ads on a number of popular European Web sites this weekend could have infected their computers with variants of the Bofra worm, experts warned on Monday.
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Because Internet Explorer is one of the programs vulnerable to a newly discovered Windows image flaw, it is possible that someone could fall victim to a virus written to exploit it just by visiting a Web site that uses JPEG images.
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Lycos vigilante attack on spammers has been hit by a vigilante attack. Spammers are suspected.
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The latest malware trend should prompt you to think twice about the links you click next time you search.
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Several incidents highlight the dangers life online presents to preserving your privacy.
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The cross-site scripting technique used by many malware propagators has branched out into a troubling new area of endeavor, as XSS attacks are turning up that inject child pornography into Web forums. One attack targeted a kids' site.
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Santy.A might sound like some kind of holiday cheer but as thousands of Web site operators are quickly finding out, the nasty little worm is only spreading fear.
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US website Monster.com suffers an online attack with the data of hundreds of thousands of users stolen.
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Spammers are suspected of hacking into and downing Lycosâs anti-spam Web site just hours after it went live. The Web site is currently inaccessible and could also be the victim of a DDoS attack.
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Online criminals are exploiting human hopes and fears to spread spam and viruses.
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Science & environment: The auction site has been the target of a hacker called Vladuz, whose actions are causing concern.
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Federal officials are trying to prosecute operators of Web sites that recruit terrorists.
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Attackers continue to use well-worn techniques, such as SQL injection, to exploit holes in popular Web applications but have also moved on to other targets, including government sites, and newer exploit methods, such as cross-site request forgery, according to the latest report filed by the Web Applications Security Consortium.The nonprofit industry group released the findings of its annual Hacking Incidents Database report this week, and despite the fact that cyber-criminals are still capable of using familiar means like SQL injection to victimize e-commerce sites and other transactional systems, a growing number of assailants are broadening their efforts and capabilities and going after new sets of targets, the research contends.Based on WASC's in-depth investigations into roughly 80 individual attacks carried out during calendar 2007, the group concludes that data theft remains the primary goal of most incidents, representing 42 percent of all the events.Surprisingly, site defacement -- thought to be a dying art in the world of profit-driven hacking -- actually still accounted for 23 percent of the attacks covered in the report, followed by exploits aimed at planting malware on sites at roughly 15 percent.And while the lion's share of the incidents studied by the group revolved around the attempted theft of sensitive data that could be sold on the underground market or used to carry out fraud, the phishing threats of years past are increasingly becoming outnumbered by attacks that utilize malware code hidden on legitimate Web applications to victimize unsuspecting end-users, the group said.Of all the threats studied by WASC in its report, 67 percent were designed specifically to derive some form of profit -- pointing to continued growth in the professionalism of those responsible for the attacks, researchers said."One of the biggest issues is that so much of this activity is being delivered directly though legitimate Web sites that are being hacked," said Ryan Barnett, a project leader at WASC who also serves as director of application security training at applications firewall vendor Breach Security, which sponsored the 2008 report."It used to be that as long as users didn't go to certain Web sites they'd be safe, but obviously, that's changing," he said. "SQL injection still works surprisingly well, so we're seeing plenty of those across the board, but you do also begin to see more use of things like cross-site request forgery, to which even greater numbers of sites might be vulnerable."SQL injection, which attempts to use security vulnerabilities occurring in the database layer of applications to compromise them, still remains a weak point in some widely-used Web systems, in particular e-commerce sites, a reality that the researcher views as surprising based on the well-established history of the technique. However, CSRF threats, which attempt to hijack authenticated Web sessions to carry out their ploys, are becoming more common, while still far less frequent than SQL injections, according to the expert. Indeed, CSRF threats accounted for only 2 percent of the incidents tracked by WASC for the 2007 report, while SQL injections represented 20 percent, the most popular format for exploit.Unintentional information disclosure, which involves sites that emanate such detailed authentication failures that hackers may use them to find a way in, was the second most popular format for attackers to break into applications at 15 percent, followed by cross-site scripting exploits, which use malware planted on legitimate sites to subvert end-users' machines, at 12 percent of the incidents.In terms of the types of organizations being assailed by the attacks tracked by WASC, the group found that government agencies actually represented the largest group of targets.Perhaps because financial services companies and retailers have improved their applications defenses, hackers have moved on to the government set as well as educational institutions, the report contends.Some 29 percent of the incidents covered in the report targeted government agencies, followed by education at 15 percent, and retailers and media outlets tied at 12 percent.In addition to attempts to steal data, WASC contends that government agencies may also be getting hacked by parties looking to embarrass or disable the organizations' sites based on ideological goals. Because government agencies are forced to report more of their security incidents publicly, hackers may merely be trying to force the organizations to admit that they have been exploited in public, the researchers said.
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(InfoWorld) - A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday. This is the first time that Storm has taken to the Web for its victims, said Dan Hubbard, head of research at San Diego-based Websense. "The big news is that Storm has added infecting sites to its arsenal," said Hubbard. Storm debuted in January but only cracked the top malware lists early this summer, and has become infamous for its ability to adapt its infection strategies. "They have a knack for latching onto the latest newsworthy events and capitalizing on the public interest in them," Symantec researcher Hon Lau said last month. "And if no newsworthy events are happening at the time, then they will just make them up." Until now, Storm has infected users via files attached to e-mail or through links embedded in spam. The change noticed by Websense's scanners, however, means that Storm's backers have moved to other attack vectors -- in particular, compromised Web sites that sport malicious IFRAMEs. Users visiting such sites are instantly infected with the Trojan if their browsers are not patched against whatever exploit the IFRAME code is throwing out. According to Hubbard, several hundred sites have been compromised by Storm's makers, then seeded with IFRAMES that can inject the Trojan into vulnerable PCs. One such site was a Republican Party Web site for the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin. Within hours after Websense notified the site's owners, however, it had been purged of the dangerous IFRAME code. By mid-morning Friday, it was safe to visit. Hubbard did not know how the site was compromised. The motive behind Storm's continued attacks and its expansion into new areas like this, said Hubbard, is a never-ending appetite for bots -- compromised computers that can be used for spamming or other criminal activities either by the original attackers or by others who lease sections of the botnet. "Storm's botnet is clearly the biggest around," said Hubbard, who estimated its size as "conservatively, in the hundreds of thousands, although some people have thrown out numbers like 1 million or 2 million or even 4 million." Earlier this month, in fact, MessageLabs pegged the botnet at 2 million machines. In the last few weeks alone, Storm has spread through e-mails touting a real-time scoreboard site for National Football League games, spam hyping a Web site that wished Americans a happy Labor Day holiday, and more mail that used YouTube videos as bait. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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Every 30th or so request for an advert was redirected to another compromised server, which in turn tried to execute the Bofra Internet Explorer exploit in an attempt to infect the user&#39;s machine.
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Internet users are being given the chance to hit back at the spammers that have become the scourge of the web, thanks to free software being distributed by Lycos Europe, the internet portal.