Hackers Infiltrated Website of Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The Security Lab Alerts of Websense reported on July 10, 2009 that hackers had compromised the website of the Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as reported by Security on July 15, 2009.

The hackers inserted invisible iframes that seemingly redirected visitors to websites containing malware, or landed them on websites that returned them back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website on its home page.

Explaining what an iframe means, security researchers say that it is an HTML tag by which one HTML page is added to another. With this, the additional page is made invisible to the computer user.

Meling Mudin, an Independent Security Researcher in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), said that the hacking incident at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs underlined that Malaysia's government needed to enhance its online systems' security, particularly that of its websites, as reported by CIO on July 15, 2009.

The researcher further said that the Malaysian officials should increase organizations' awareness about security problems and assist them in finding appropriately skilled people for the task of resolving such problems.

Mudin added that the Malaysian government had a problem of frequently transferring people that resulted in administrators deft at their work usually finishing up performing only paper duties.

In other words, administrators who look after the security of websites are not adequately placed to safeguard the Government websites.

Attack against a Malaysian government website to spread malicious software is not new as several such happenings have taken place previously too. During April 2008, the Tourism website of Malaysia had reportedly become exposed to attack when some hacker allegedly exploited the site's cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. At that time Google had issued a warning as a result many security analysts trusted that the Malaysia Tourism portal served malware.

In the end, users who visit websites are urged to update their computer systems with the most recent editions of antivirus, anti-spyware and other anti-malware software so that it may prevent the download of any malicious code on their computers while accessing a government or official site.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 8/5/2009