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Online Crooks Hijack Pravda.ru the Russian News Site

Investigators from F-Secure an anti-virus firm based in Finland caution of cyber-criminals who compromised the English part in Pravda.ru the widely visited news website in Russia.

Seemingly, following the english.pravda.ru hijack, the Safe Browsing service of Google labeled it malicious. This means that the site would have an alert from Google whenever any Web-surfer would search for it online, while Firefox and Chrome would by default block its access to visitors.

Notably, english.pravda.ru represents a vital means to get news of Russia for people speaking English language, therefore there's possibility of having plenty of foreign Web-surfers for it.

Meanwhile investigators at F-Secure, who examined this hack, said that malicious code was inserted inside the website that installed exploits abusing Java security flaws.

And once that was successfully done, a Trojan got planted because of the assault of drive-by download type, which served like one botnet client while letting hijackers to gain entry into the contaminated PC.

Remarking about this assault, Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen at F-Secure stated that an assault of the kind was especially devious. For, a Web-surfer could visit one particular news website over an excessively lengthy period and begin reposing faith in it. Then all of a sudden it could become unsafe followed with it causing compromise of the user's PC simply when he viewed his favorite web-page, Hypponen explained. F-secure.com published this on May 11, 2011.

Furthermore according to Hypponen, 5-years back, incase anyone attempted at hacking into a prominent website like Pravda.ru, he would have characteristically erased all content while replacing it with irrelevant images. But a modern hacker would perform an unnoticeable change on the website, attempting at remaining undetected for as lengthy a period possible, anticipating for acquiring access to innumerable PCs.

Unfortunately, cyber-criminals have been abusing Java flaws more-and-more ever-since 2010. Indeed, data from G-Data released during April 2011 makes this point more credible as it shows how the top 5 malicious programs in the company's Top Ten List attacked Java bugs during March 2011.

Users are, nevertheless advised against deactivating self triggering Java updates, while ensuring that all Java security patches are loaded.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

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