Cyber Criminals Hacked Paul McCartney’s Website for Distributing Malware

The official website of former Beatles star Paul McCartney was hacked to spread malware infection across visitors via drive-by downloads. People's favorite Paul McCartney won multiple Grammy awards is an English songwriter, singer, composer and poet.

ScanSafe, the web security company that noticed the hack, said the attack uses the most sophisticated and advanced crimeware toolkit called LuckySploit. This toolkit, notes computer security site NoVirusThanks.org, has been recently made updated to add some HTML files that carry malicious and obfuscated JavaScript code.

Moreover, LuckySploit was concealed within an iframe (not visible) on the website that obfuscated malevolent JavaScript code with the help of key encryption. This code would subsequently unleash exploits that would download rootkit type of executable programs on the victims' computers.

ScanSafe further added that its security researchers detected the malware infection on April 4, 2009, which was also the day when McCartney joined Ringo Starr for a stage performance after many years.

Spencer Parker, Director of Product Management, ScanSafe, said once a user's PC becomes infected with the malicious rootkit, all personal information is likely to become unsafe, as reported by DANIWEB this on April 7, 2009.

In addition, Parker said that McCartney's website was likely to be a very lucrative target for online miscreants considering that it had been receiving a lot of attention. Moreover, users needed to know that most malware dispersal was happening through bulk compromise of reputable and legitimate websites, Parker warned.

However, ScanSafe reported that McCartney's site was fixed although the number of compromised users remained unclear.

Besides, security experts stated that the number of legitimate sites hosting malicious software was rising at a fast pace. Cyber criminals use crafty technique as in the case of McCartney's website.

Further, according to the 'State of Internet Security' report from Websense Security Labs for July-December 2008, 77% of websites which have been hijacked to host malware are lawful sites. This rate, says Websense, increased nearly 3% during January-June 2008, while the total number of websites containing malware increased 46% in the whole year.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/14/2009