Cyber Criminals Hijack Fox Websites

Security researchers at Sucuri, the company monitoring Web integrity, warn that cyber criminals have compromised a large number of websites operated by Fox Television Stations Inc. along with its sister firms.

Sucuri reports that it came across the compromised websites on July 13, 2010. Actually, the security company was running an auto-scan to identify websites exploited in a largely prevalent BHSEO assault that promoted a pharmacy site. During the scanning process, the compromised websites appeared.

BHSEO (Black Hat Search Engine Optimization) reportedly refers to multiple attacks or techniques that cyber criminals employ for manipulating search results related to certain keywords that lead to harmful sites. In the current instance, the attackers utilized numerous authentic websites to raise the position of the bogus pharmacy website they are promoting, the researchers note.

As per Sucuri, cyber criminals exploited the hacked Internet sites for taking control over search results associated with enhancement pills and prescription drugs. The chief issue, claims the security company, is that the exploit is very subtle and becomes visible to just Google's crawlers, while routine visitors don't get to know about it.

Consequently, webmasters can test whether the new attack affects their websites by doing a Google search for "inurl:fox," "cheap viagra" or "inurl:..com."

One more concerning issue with the attack is the total absence of exploitation of a vulnerability or software for hijacking these websites.

Commenting on this problem, the researchers at Sucuri observed that the spam attack didn't just affect a particular hosting provider or software. There were many other things affected like dedicated servers, VPSs, and shared hosting providers. Joomla, WordPress, even static websites appeared on the lengthy catalog of spamming interwebs of Google, the researchers stated, as reported by Sucuri on July 13, 2010.

Finally, it is worth noting that such incidences appeared to be rising lately. During the 2nd week of July 2010, the Sucuri researchers discovered that online crooks hacked many websites of the Government of Argentina and thereafter exploited them in BHSEO campaigns, while a few of them simply installed malicious software on visitors' computers.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 24-07-2010

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