Google Thwarts Santy.A Worm Amid Growing Threat
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Richard Stiennon, Webroot vice president of threat research, said the increasing number of desktop search tools -- now coming out from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others -- may also be leveraged by attackers.
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Security firms are warning that new variants of the Santy worm have start spreading through other search engines than Google. The new versions now also use AOL and Yahoo.
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When the Santy.a worm started spreading on Tuesday, Mikko Hypponen knew he had a way to stop the worm in its tracks. The only problem: He had trouble finding the right people to talk to at search giant Google.
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The Santy worm, which appeared just before the Christmas holiday and uses search engines to spread, appears to be morphing into dangerous variants, virus experts warned Tuesday.
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Blog: Although rare, a sophisticated attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack using Google Desktop.
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The Santy worm, which searches Google for sites that use a vulnerable version of the search engine&#39;s technology, is being tackled by Google.
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A new, more dangerous variant of the Santy.e virus appeared over the holiday weekend. The malware uses search engines to locate vulnerable Web sites, which it defaces.
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Web search engine company GoogleÂ is blocking efforts by a new Internet worm to use its search engine to find vulnerable computers on the Internet, the company announced late Tuesday.
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A new version of Santy worm has appeared over the weekend. Dubbed as Santy.e, it poses a broader threat than its ancestors, which used Google to spot vulnerable web bulletin boards, then defaced them.
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UPDATE: Campaign grows from distributed denial-of-service attack to Digg bumps.
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Search site Google has inadvertently helped a worm hit thousands of websites.
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Last weekend a new version of Santy appeared which is even more dangerous. Santy.e doesn&#39;t only targets phpBB but it also attacks other PHP scripts that are vulnerable to the file inclusion exploit.
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Days after Google Inc. took action to thwart the new Santy worm, security companies warned that variants have begun to spread using Google and other search engines.
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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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A new variant of the Bagle email worm is spreading rapidly across the internet today.
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An Internet Explorer vulnerability first reported yesterday is already getting a workout. Malware utilizing the hole for installation is turning up on various Russian porn sites, with more trouble expected.
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A new version of the Santy worm appeared over Christmas, and according to analysis done by some global security firms, may pose a broader threat than its ancestors.