Malvertising Campaign Targets Renowned Website of Brazilian Sports News

Security researchers of security firm Trustwave spotted a malvertising campaign targeting a renowned site of sports news of Brazil namely lancernet.com.br which surely indicates that fraudsters are poised to earn revenue from online interest during FIFA World Cup 2014 tournament which starts on 12th June, 2014.

Research team of Trustwave, SpiderLabs, reported about the plot on Tuesday, 10th June, 2014 which abused an Adobe Flash Player exploit to target Internauts. The firm confirms that the website of the well-known newspaper Lance! (lancenet.com.br) was discovered hosting the tainted ad throughout May (2014).

Scammers often use fake identities, web-hosting accounts and email ids while carrying out fraudulent and malicious advertising known as malvertising to trick businesses. In this particular case, the attackers abused zero-day vulnerability in Adobe (CVE-2014-0515) to deliver malware to visitors of the site.

The security firm blogged that the advertisement in question was redirecting Internauts to ib.adnxs.com which is a domain linked with previous malvertising campaign.

The bug was fixed in late April (2014) by Adobe but Trustwave observed that hackers employed new ways to abuse the vulnerability instead of previous techniques.

According to Trustwave, the lancenet.com.br website was informed about the malvertising attack and steps to fix the crisis are being taken.

Eweek.com published news on 11th June, 2014 quoting Ziv Mador, Director of Security Research of Trustwave as saying that as far as Trustwave can tell, this attack is the first such malvertising attack related to the FIFA World Cup event.

During the FIFA World Cup event, there are many steps that can be taken to provide Internet security to end users and enterprises.

He said that many workers browse the Web for updates of scores, live streaming of videos, etc., during the World Cup and other major sports events and therefore businesses must have anti-malware software installed like gateways which can identify and filter out malware in actual time.

He added that anti-malware gateway technology guards users from blended threats, data loss and zero-day vulnerabilities and helps Internauts to use the Internet and cloud applications securely.

Moreover, users must make sure that their software is updated with latest available patches.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/20/2014