Word of an interesting, reportedly wide scale attack, is starting to emerge. Evidently someone compromised several websites, "some quite popular" (and this is key), which append malicious javascript to every file served. A vistor to the site, with a vulnerable machine, has several pieces of software from a Russian site installed on their machine. This is a report from SANS.
A large number of web sites, some of them quite popular, were compromised earlier this week to distribute malicious code. The attacker uploaded a small file with javascript to infected web sites, and altered the web server configuration to append the script to all files served by the web server. The Storm Center and others are still investigating the method used to compromise the servers. Several server administrators reported that they were fully patched.
If a user visited an infected site, the javascript delivered by the site would instruct the user's browser to download an executable from a Russian web site and install it. Different executables were observed. These trojan horse programs include keystroke loggers, proxy servers and other back doors providing full access to the infected system.
The javascript uses a so far unpatched vulnerability in MSIE to download and execute the code. No warning will be displayed. The user does not have to click on any links. Just visiting an infected site will trigger the exploit.
This is a simple attack, in theory, but one that has never been executed successfuly widescale. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
posted by mt at 11:31
Twentysomethings spamming people, stealing customer lists from major ISP's, 100k payoffs, spammers going to jail?
Strange days.
posted by mt at 07:38 