Sites all Over the World Being Attacked
2007-10-13
Websites all over the world are being hacked, this is old news, however it is gradually becoming more apparent that a vast amount are due to carelessness of administrators.
On the domestic side, we saw the after-effect of a breach of an official California government site result in the entire ca.gov domain being taken down by careless administrators with the federal General Services Administration.
Those ca.gov domains hadn't been completely cleared of inappropriate content even after the GSA kerfuffle spiked the whole top level domain for hours. Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software, the firm that found the hacked ca.gov sites, pointed out how one server (now fixed) still had Viagra ads in place after the domain problems had been corrected.
It's not just domains in the US finding favor with criminals. Trend Micro found problems in the Philippines with its official sites:
Just this weekend, the official Web site of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines was reported to be littered with links that redirect users to adult-themed Web pages. The Web site has since been wiped clean of the said malicious ads.
The "Past Events" page in the events section of the said Web site bore pharmaceutical and pornographic ads. These included Viagra Online Pharmacy, Order Viagra, Cialis Online, Microbikini, 2Sex Maniac, Underage Sex, Sexual Photos, Sex Party and Wild Sex. The other posted events were dated Sept 29 and 30, indicating the relative recency of the malicious posting.
Philippine interests have been attacked by criminals in other ways. Trend Micro again cited issues cropping up in the Philippines, with phishing attempts being made against banks and other financial and government customers.
Spams for the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) have been hitting Philippine inboxes, saying people need to login and review their accounts. Doing so connects the login details to the phishers.
PayPal and the US Internal Revenue Service have both been spoofed for phishing scams. These phishes were found on a university website, Western Mindanao State University, in the Philippine region of Mindanao.
In India, F-Secure discovered a police academy website experienced a compromise. One of their servers proved to have a Bank of America phishing site hosted on it.
"The Police Academy has been notified, and we expect that they'll sort this out swiftly," F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen wrote. "After all, they have courses on computer crime listed in their course calendar."
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