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Website of Hong Kong's Democratic Party Compromised by Cybercrooks

Recently, security researchers at the security firm, Kaspersky revealed that, the website of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong was hijacked by the cybercriminals lately.

As per the security researchers at Kaspersky Lab, this attack's elements were nearly similar to those of a previous one that compromised the website of Amnesty International, the UK.

A malicious iframe was inserted into the English version of dphk.org and directed to an exploit.html page harbored on the similar domain. The web page loaded 3 variant exploits for the CVE-2011-0611 Flash flaw that was fixed by Adobe during early May, 2011.

What's striking regarding this attack is the technique utilized to circulate the malware. While in majority of the instances, the payload is injected in the exploit itself, here it was cached by the user's browser beforehand and the exploit only had the objective of running it from the cache folder.

The web browsers were scammed into caching the malware ridden file as it is being served as an image file namely newsvine.jp2.

Elucidating the recent attack thoroughly, Kaspersky stated that, if one of the rouge flashes becomes victorious in downloading and running the newsvine.jp2 file harbored on the server, it instantly leaves several files. The security firm further stated that, the drop server is not active at that time, as reported by Secure List on May 30, 2011.

The firm added that, as several individuals run week versions of Adobe Flash and rarely update their software, the crooks had a quite golden opportunity of attacking innocent targets.

The security vendor further highlighted that, the recent attack displays that political parties' websites will remain to be a key target of cyber attacks in 2011. The company's thought is further substantiated by cyber attacks identified by security vendor Symantec lately that were targeted against 2 websites relating to human rights in Hong Kong and the Philippines.

Finally, to lessen these malware attacks, security experts suggest users to download the Adobe Flash updates on their machines. Besides, security experts' suggest users to make themselves aware regarding the several kinds of techniques that cybercrooks utilize to hijack websites, so as to avoid being victimized to such attacks.

Related article: Websites – The Latest Weapon in The Hands of Phishers

» SPAMfighter News - 6/8/2011

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