Hackers Turn Cleveland Into Malware Server
The Register - London, England, UK
Tens of thousands of websites belonging to Fortune 500 corporations, state government agencies and schools have been infected with malicious code that attempts to engage in click fraud and steal online game credentials from people who visit the destinations, security researches say.
At time of writing, more than 94,000 URLs had been infected by the fast-moving exploit, which redirects users to the uc8010-dot-com domain, according to this search. Security company Computer Associates was infected at one point, as were sites belonging to the state of Virginia, the city of Cleveland and Boston University.
“This is a wide variety of sites that have been impacted,” said Mary Landesman, a researcher for ScanSafe, a company that provides real-time information to clients about malicious sites. “It’s a real in-your-face example of what we see everyday. It’s really time for companies that have a vested interest in a web presence to take a hard look at what their security posture is.”
Malicious hackers were able to breach the sites by exploiting un-patched SQL injection vulnerabilities that resided on the servers, according to Johannes Ullrich, CTO for the SANS Internet Storm Center. The injections included javascript that redirected end users to the rogue site, which then attempted to exploit multiple vulnerabilities to install key-logging software that stole passwords for various online games, he and other researchers said.
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