Hackers Promote Child Porn through Legitimate Web Forums

Cyber criminals are increasingly hacking online forums being hosted on authorized web pages for promoting child pornography, experts alerted on June 12, 2007 and Vnunet published it in news.

According to security firm Sophos, most of the compromised forums run on authorized websites, and one even runs on a children's website. The posts in these forums now show offensive words and have links that lure viewers to different sites of child pornography, experts at Sophos said.

The criminals distribute links and divert traffic to all kinds of unpleasant web content using some of those techniques that malware creators employ to infect users with malware, said Fraser Howard, virus researcher at Sophos and SecurityComputing published it in news on June 12, 2007.

Posts are being put on legitimate sites, and this is a cause of enormous concern. The situation is such that the attacks can victimize any website irrespective of its content. That exposes innocent surfers including children to offensive material, Howard said and SecureComputing published it on June 12, 2007.

Sophos has drawn the attention of the Internet Watch Foundation to the sites hosting the crude posts. The Foundation is a self-regulatory body that fights illegal content on the Internet.

In a report that McAfee released in early June 2007, there are about 17.5% risky sites among search results with adult keywords. This figure has increased since December 2006. Also, the increase has been due to a dramatic increase in the number of risky adult websites by 72.2% included in sponsored hits.

Eminent researcher and advisor to McAfee SiteAdvisor, Ben Edelman said that the indispensable search engines should not be allowed to come down as any other online activity where bad elements from the Net dominate. The security community could ensure users, safe searching on the search engines, as published by Internet AD Sales in the first week of June 2007.

Since unprotected websites are vulnerable to cyber criminals wanting to spread their malware, it is very important for web hosts to guard against hacking attacks. For that they should deploy security programs that protect from emerging threats, as per the news reported by SecureComputing on June 12, 2007.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 6/29/2007