A Website of Filipino Government Harboring Malware, Says Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes the security company states that a cache of harmful web-links set up for ensuring online security has of late labeled Philippine government's Department of Agriculture as the government wing which is having malware on its authorized online site.

The company states that a spam program had been injected into the website's default page along with 5 other pages that included "About Us" section, "Contact Us" section, "Department Mission and Vision" section, "Advisory Banner" section and "DA's History" section.

Telling further about the aforementioned contamination, Jovi Umawing, Intelligence Analyst at Malwarebytes stated that visitors who inadvertently accessed the portal's contaminated sections didn't get served with any malware; therefore there was not any risk, as such, of them having their devices contaminated with badware. Softpedia.com published this dated July 25, 2014.

Nevertheless, by accessing those infected pages, the website's page rank increased facilitating gamblers to play truant. The technique is known as BlackHat Search Engine Optimization (SEO), in short BHSEO. The implication is that the website's popularity rose via its appearance among the top search hits, resulting in greater number of visitors as well as increased profit for the scammers who controlled the particular site.

Given this, in a security advisory, Malwarebytes asserts that an invader of the government website installed the spam program and compromised it. Therefore, it's advisable that visitors don't access the above stated web-pages, while run an anti-virus scan for spotting malevolent operation as well as stopping the website's loading, the company continues within the advisory.

It (the firm) adds that the affected site's administrators have already been informed regarding the sinister program's existence, so it is expected that they would manage in eliminating the malware at early as feasible.

In the meantime, in a similar instance of scammers exploiting websites via the notorious BHSEO technique, Sucuri another security company, during February 2011, stated that numerous Joomla websites characterized with the system of content management were getting utilized within one BlackHat search engine optimization spam attack involving massive number of contaminated sites, the majority of which were small as also utilized old and attack prone editions of Joomla.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/4/2014