The Pirate Bay’s Advertising Server Hacked And Abused

Web-hackers recently attacked The Pirate Bay's advertising server for infecting the site's visitors with Trojans and viruses. By exploiting a security flaw within Pirate Bay's software, they managed to spread several malware programs, prompting Firefox, Google and a number of virus scanners to block the site. Torrent Freak published this on September 13, 2010.

In an alert notification, Google said that if a user accessing the website didn't have an anti-virus scanner running on his system alternatively wasn't surfing with a browser, which displayed the Google-listed 'bad' websites then he might be vulnerable to various extremely harmful malware.

Meanwhile, the person credited with first spotting the attack is Ernesto who did it over Torrent Freak. Later, Google labeled The Pirate Bay (TPB) as harmful, suggesting caution on the part of visitors. The same kind of alerts came from Firefox as well as a few virus scanners too.

And though no malicious file was hosted on TPB, the advertisements of the website led onto several exploits and Trojans. Further, TPB hadn't sanctioned those ads, rather it were hackers who planted them using vulnerability in the ad server of TPB for disseminating the malware programs.

Incidentally, the ad server running on TPB is a popular PHP open source and it's called OpenX that emerged from phpAdsNew. This ad server has security problems, which unfortunately, a number of websites utilizing it, had to resolve with great difficulty.

Meanwhile, people often visiting TPB may recollect that the website getting labeled in this way isn't something new. Warnings of this kind have been made a number of times earlier too, while each time these associated with malevolent advertisements. Since it's the lone section on the site that 3rd-parties can make access to, it therefore turns out as the most attack-prone region.

Team experts of TPB revealed that work was ongoing for fixing the problem through the plugging of security holes, following which the internationally greatest of torrent sites would be reinstalled and set to function as before.

Until that time, they suggest that visitors must maintain caution while accessing the site and essentially avoid all dubious web-links.

Related article: THE SPAM MAFIA

» SPAMfighter News - 9/23/2010