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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The latest malware trend should prompt you to think twice about the links you click next time you search.
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Latest worm poses a risk to many Web sites using the PHP scripting language.
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Browser flaw may leave you vulnerable to phishing attacks.
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Plan to target websites that 'groom' terrorists
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The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.These Web-based attacks, called &quot;drive-by downloads&quot; by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore&#39;s An Inconvenient Truth movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim&#39;s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim&#39;s PC. &quot;The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,&quot; said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.Some of the data surprised Provos.&quot;When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,&quot; he said.It turns out the Web&#39;s nice neighborhoods aren&#39;t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.&quot;We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher,&quot; he said. But &quot;there really wasn&#39;t a huge difference.&quot;&quot;Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn&#39;t good enough,&quot; he noted.Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google&#39;s research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia (4 percent), Malaysia (2.2 percent), and Korea (2 percent).It costs next to nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. &quot;They&#39;re the Kleenex Web sites,&quot; he said. Criminals &quot;know they&#39;re going to be shut down, and they don&#39;t care.&quot;Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: Fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.So how to stop this growing pestilence?Google&#39;s Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. &quot;You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology,&quot; he said.But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. &quot;I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts,&quot; for the problem to go away, he said.
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Infected computers can be used as &quot;zombies&quot; to send spam or launch attacks on Web sites. Spreading Trojans via chat rooms is not unusual.
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A note sent through AOL's popular instant-messaging software directs victims to Web sites that host the dangerous graphics.
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A newly identified malicious program not only messes up its victims' computers, it taunts them too.
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Online intruders hit a server owned by advertising host Falk and use it to distribute a destructive program via banner ads.
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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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Days after sample attack code for a yet-to-be-patched flaw surfaced, malicious sites are popping up that exploit the hole.
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Malicious hackers tout a site with an strip show download to entice victims to download malware.
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Malware purveyors earlier this week cracked part of the CA web site and redirected visitors to a site known to be serving malicious software.
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A hacker has successfully attacked a Web page within Microsoft's U.K. domain.
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Hole allows attackers to create fake Web sites that look genuine.
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Users should stay away from untrusted Web sites and e-mails from unfamiliar sources to avoid becoming victims of an attack aided by three serious security holes in Windows, security firms warned over the weekend.