My Opera Discovered Hosting Malicious Code

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab the anti-virus security company are cautioning that hackers are exploiting My Opera, as they've discovered its servers hosting a botnet program.

Writes Kaspersky expert Dmitry Bestuzhev, a number of reports have been come in regarding malicious software hosted on the code servers of Google and Mozilla. And now, the Lab has also discovered malicious software on the community servers of My Opera, he blogs on September 23, 2010.

Furthermore according to Bestuzhev, My Opera an Internet hosting service that's available for free to people surfing with the Opera Web-browser, was hosting an IRC botnet with a PHP base. It seems the bot has emanated from Brazil, as the code's analysis suggests. However, it isn't quite apparent as to who the person is behind loading it onto My Opera, or the time during when he loaded it, Bestuzhev blogs. Threat Post published this on September 24, 2010.

Additionally according to Bestuzhev, malware that's PHP based cannot be easily detected as textual content rules the basic program files and not compiled binaries that have signatures easy to identity. Consequently, manual auditing is required for discovering their objective alternatively filtering is needed to block possible malware, he explains.

Incidentally, My Opera is widely used as a support website as well as a social-networking platform. There are a total of 5m users for this service, with each account enjoying 2GB of space. And like with a number of other costless file hosting or Web services, My Opera too facilitates cyber-criminals to push malicious codes devoid of having to buy its Internet connectivity.

One more reason why there is a preference for free hosting services catering to innumerable people is that they don't react to abuse complaints quickly that are pretty numerous. Research by Kaspersky has further found that malware is commonly dumped into the 'ripway,' '110mb,' 'rapidshare' and 'fileave' Hosting domains.

And while so far, Kaspersky has detected nearly 100 malevolent accounts on My.Opera.com, Bestuzhev says there may be more, considering that the browser firm is constantly watching the content pertaining to its rapidly-expanding social network and hosting service, Threat Post reports.

Related article: MU Students Received phishing E-mail

» SPAMfighter News - 10/4/2010