A web wise terror network
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Gordon Corera looks at how Osama Bin Laden's terror network has made the most of modern communications.
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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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AOL Instant Messenger message directs victims to Web sites that host the dangerous images.
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You wouldn't believe some of the sites that have fallen victim to this security threat, but Martin Heller tells you how to protect yourself.
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Vivid imagination of al-Q 'web guru' revealed Younis Tsouli - irhabi007 - was earlier this month jailed for ten years. It's a good sentence for the cyber-jihad twit, someone who became fodder for television news shows like 60 Minutes. Wishing to show how al Qaeda was beating the pants off the good guys on the Internet, Tsouli was the perfect example for them, one of fearmongering at its finest.â¦
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Researchers in the U.S. say they've successfully shown how attackers could compromise a network designed to make it harder to trace Web sites they are viewing.
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Introducing The 404s, a contest to find the least informative military websites. Strike a blow for open government; win prizes. In Danger Room.
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Al QaedaÂs increased reliance on various forms of media have made Web-savvy sympathizers like Abu Omar ever more important.
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Security researchers studying the latest Internet crime trends have discovered a new Eastern European website that uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs. The operators of the botnet and website charge clients for each successful PC infection.
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User-generated Web content is becoming a target for hackers and cross-site scripting attacks on Web sites can lead to malware taking over the browsers of machines that use the sites.
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Internet Security Systems' intrusion prevention software on Crossbeam Systems security switches.
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New survey says growing Web dependence puts Internet in terrorists' bull's-eye.
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Recently discovered vulnerability allows hackers to use Web graphics to launch attacks.
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Internet user profiling could help repressive regimes identify dissidents, group warns.
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Introducing The 404s, Wired's contest to find the least-informative sites on the military web. Strike a blow for open government (and win prizes).  In Danger Room.
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Traceroute Security researcher Jose Nazario has uncovered circumstantial evidence of the use of botnets in politically-motivated denial of service attacks.â¦
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Rita Katz surfs jihadi websites for indications of terrorist activity. Her take on the latest Osama bin Laden videoâand the machinery that produced it.