Back in November, I wrote about rogue blogs created in subdirectories of legitimate websites. The blogs poisoned Google search results for millions of relatively unpopular keywords (the long tail) redirecting visitors to scareware websites. This hack mainly affected sites hosted on Servage network.
Recently I’ve been contacted by one of Servage clients who found his sites hacked:
I noticed the anomalous traffic to domains that are essentially either completely parked or just used for email addresses (SMTP forwarding rather than anything ‘clever’ with webmail.) That led me to the file structures and a quick google led me to your site.
He sent me the offending files he found under his account (thanks Matthew). Now I can share my analysis of the files with you.
Continue »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Google notifications, security patches, malicious PHP code … »»
This research is provoked by the following blogpost of Joshua Long where he lists domain names used by Koobface. Generally, I focus on website hacks and don’t research malware distributed via email spam and social networks (Koobface is an anagram of Facebook). However that list showed me how legitimate hacked sites were integrated into Koobface scheme and I decided to try to investigate how the whole thing worked.
Joshua’s list was a good starting point. I saw multiple rogue blogspot blogs that followed the same pattern and multiple compromised sites where those blogs redirected to. For some reason, most of the functionality of the malicious pages on the hacked sites is implemented as a client-side JavaScript, so I could easily retrieve and analyze those scripts. They provided me with very interesting details about the internals of the attack: sites it expected as referrers and usage of infected PCs. As a result I came up to the following scheme:
Koobface attack flow and other details »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Gumblar zombies, StopBadware reports, WordPress updates … »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
.htaccess hack, attack against PHP sites, IE vulnerability, … »»
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
This is the second article about the hacker attack against osCommerce-powered sites. In the first part, you can find the description of the attack along with detection and clean-up instructions. Now I want to show you what exactly hackers did and how they managed to poison Google search results.
The main goal is to demystify hackers and encourage webmasters to explore their own sites. The more you know about hackers, the better you’ll be at protecting your site against their attacks.
This post is based on the files and access logs of three compromised sites that I received from a webmaster who contacted me a couple of weeks ago.
Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.
IE patch, updates on attacks, Google quiz, Firefox 3.6, UP testimonials »»