Mass host hack bigger than first thought, hits 10,000 sites
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The widespread invasion reported earlier this month is both affecting more Apache servers than previously believed and exhibiting a high rate of reinfection, according to researchers.
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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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Blog: Original researcher makes public his own exploit code.
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A hacked server in Germany fed malicious code to unsuspecting Internet Explorer users at an unknown number of Web sites for several hours over the weekend, a banner ad-serving company acknowledged Monday.
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An attack combining malicious codes on Web sites and end-user laziness could compromise millions of routers still configured with their out-of-the-box defaults.
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Web gateway filtering specialist Finjan is reporting a new toolkit that uses randomized JavaScript to stay hidden from virus crawlers and deliver its payload via compromised Web sites.Dubbed by Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center (MCRC) as the "Random JS Toolkit," the malware development package is allowing attackers to create threats that only attempt to victimize an individual computer in the same manner a single time to protect against discovery by anti-virus systems and researchers' automated "crawlers."By dynamically changing the JavaScript employed to deliver each variant of attack being created, and by using random file names that are only delivered to the same machine or IP address once, Finjan researchers said the malware authoring package is meant to avoid the programs used by AV researchers to find new threats emerging on the Web.Typically when automated crawler programs come across new attack samples, they return to the threats' source URLs to verify their names and characteristics and to create signature files that allow their products to block the programs -- or they enter the sites onto so-called blacklists of compromised domains.However, once a machine has been infected with an attack made using the Random JS Toolkit, the threat will recognize that the machine has already been targeted and won't attempt to download it again, thereby thwarting efforts to identify or track the exploits, Finjan experts contend.During the month of December 2007, Finjan estimates that more than 10,000 individual sites were compromised with attacks built using the Random JS Toolkit. Most of the URLs serving as distribution points for the attacks were legitimate sites that had been hijacked, the company said.Among the infected sites were some that would qualify as well-known, highly trusted domains, said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of Finjan.Ben-Itzhak said the toolkit serves as a prime example of the types of tactics he expects leading-edge malware authors to utilize more frequently in the coming year."We've found the initial 10,000 sites, but we're sure that there are many more that have already been infected. When we can find this number of exploits, it is clear that this must be a very significant attack that has affected a lot of people," he said. "Using the combination of techniques available in this toolkit, the threats that are being created can become very powerful and stay alive to infect people for longer periods of time."Among the types of malware infections being served up using the toolkit, Finjan has observed everything from Trojan viruses and keystroke loggers to botnet recruiting programs, he said.For its part, Finjan's real-time code inspection technology can defend against such threats because it eschews the use of traditional virus signatures or blacklists in favor of constant monitoring for any malware activity coming across a network armed with one of its devices, Ben-Itzhak maintains.Rival AV vendors, including Symantec, contend that features such as the market leader's recently developed "generic exploit prevention," based on behavioral cues, should also be able to isolate and defend against such emerging attacks.Unlike the widespread iFrame attacks that proliferated across the Web during 2007, threats created using the Random JS Toolkit will also be much harder for security researchers to track down because they do not lead back to central sites where the actual malware code itself is hosted, Finjan maintains.Since the involved malware code is loaded directly on a site, and it won't attempt infect the same computer or IP address twice, traditional URL blacklisting and signature-based techniques will likely prove futile against the attack, the company said.However, from what the security appliance vendor can deduce, Ben-Itzhak said the firm believes there is only one malware group currently using the toolkit."From what we can tell, all the information flowing back from the compromised sites is heading to the same server," he said. "This indicates that there is probably only one group controlling this malware code thus far, and that they are probably being very successful; this is just another step forward for the criminals involved to continue to improve their attack methods and remain undetected."Ben-Itzhak said that the involved server is not one that matches any of the company's lists of machines controlled by well-known malware authoring groups such as the Russian Business Network. The server the company is tracking was originally located in Europe, but has recently been moved to China -- and likely will continue to be moved around to avoid detection, according to the expert.Most of the data the security company has seen being sent to the server has been related to online banking username and password data, he said.As part of its investigation, Finjan discovered that one of the Web properties infected with the randomized JavaScript attacks was an online advertising network that serves up as many as 14 million online banner ads per week. The security device maker reported that unnamed company was informed and is currently working to clean out its systems.
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Tool kits spark explosion in malicious code base, says Symantec One weekend in June, a little-known Trojan downloader made a major debut on the international malware stage after it managed to burrow its way into more than 10,000 websites in just 72 hours. Infected sites - including one connected to rock musician Bon Jovi and another that raises money for charity work of the late Mother Teresa - suddenly became the agents of Russian crime gang, as they pushed malware on unsuspecting visitors.â¦
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Flooded for 12 hours At least three DNS root servers, including one maintained by the US Department of Defense, were flooded with data for about 12 hours in an attack that was notable more for its audacity than any noticeable degradation of internet traffic.â¦
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Hackers co-opted several popular Web sites including comedycentral.com over the weekend, using them to infect thousands of computers with a virus that can be used to steal passwords, bank accounts and other personal information. -washingtonpost.com
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Several hundred pornography sites are surprising unwitting users with a smorgasbord of exploits via Mpack, the already notorious hacker toolkit that launched massive attacks from a network of more than 10,000 compromised domains.
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Search site Google has inadvertently helped a worm hit thousands of websites.
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Three of the 13 computers used to manage global internet traffic are hacked overnight. It's one of the biggest attacks since 2002. By the Associated Press.
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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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In one of the most significant hack attempts of the past few years, attackers tried to take down key parts of the Internet by targeting critical routing servers.
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A bug in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Proxy Server 2 can let hackers spoof Web content, such as a trusted site, with their own fake content, the Redmond
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More than half of all Web sites serving up attack code are legitimate domains that have been hacked by criminals, according to a study by Websense Inc.
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Hole allows attackers to create fake Web sites that look genuine.