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Unmask Parasites - Check your web pages for hidden links, iframes, malicious scripts, unauthorized redirects and other signs of security problems.
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Lorem Ipsum and Twitter Trends in Malware

26 Jan 12   Filed in Website exploits with 1 Comment

A couple of years ago I wrote about malware attacks that used Twitter API to generate domain names for their malicious sites using trending topics as keys in the domain generating algorithm.

  • Each domain was in use for a few hours only
  • The next domain names would become available just a few hours before the malicious scripts on hacked sites begin to use them.

Since 2009, I’ve seen many revisions of that attack. It has never been the most prevalent issue but as far as I can tell it constantly evolves and mutates. The recent update of the malicious script injected by this attack looked quite interesting and I decided to find out what has changed since late 2009.
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Matt Cutts on Malware

11 Jan 12   Filed in Tips and Tricks, Unmask Parasites with 0 Comments

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Selected Tweets (Oct-Nov 2011)

21 Nov 11   Filed in Tweet Week with 0 Comments

Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.

It has been a while since the last Tweet Week. The main reason is I don’t tweet that often now to post my tweets every week and I don’t want to post old news here either.

So what happened? The answer is I can’t get used to Twitter web interface – it is so inconvenient. I had to use it when I had some strange problems with my Twitter client (twhirl). Thank’s god, I’ve finally made my twhirl work so I hope I will be able to tweet more often.

Anyway, here are some of the latest tweets.
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Why Does Google Consider Some Images Malicious?

18 Nov 11   Filed in Tips and Tricks with 2 Comments

The other day I received an email from a webmaster whose site was blacklisted by Google. In Webmaster Tools, he found the following example of a malicious code detected on his site (domain changed):

<img src="http://example .net/images/logos/rssicon.png" />

So why did Google think this image tag was malicious? Can images be malicious? After all they are not scripts, iframes or embedded executable objects that that hackers use to attack web surfers.
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/tmp/wp_inc or Not Your Typical WordPress Attack

09 Nov 11   Filed in Website exploits with 16 Comments

This post will provide a very detailed and rather technical description of the latest massive WordPress hack. I find it interesting in many ways. Mainly because it’s so atypical.

If you don’t have time to read the whole article, you can head directly to the short description of the attack and then to the Summary section where I talk about what’s new, strange and uncommon in this attack. Or if you are a webmaster of a hacked blog, go to the “To Webmasters” section – it will help you resolve the problem.
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Tweet Week: August 22-28, 2011

29 Aug 11   Filed in Tweet Week with 0 Comments

Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.

TimThumb attacks, We Stop Badware Host program, blog scrapers, Apache DOS and workaround »»

Hackers target unpatched WooFramework

24 Aug 11   Filed in Short Attack Reviews with 9 Comments

When Michael VanDeMar mentioned the malicious “googlesafebrowsing .com” domain, I decided to check how exactly it was used in malware attacks. It’s quite a popular trick to mimic Google’s own domains to make malicious code look legitimate. I have a “collection” of several dozens on misspelled Google Analytics domains alone that were used for malware distribution. In this case, the domain name was made up rather than misspelled. It referres to Google’s Safe Browsing project and their diagnostic pages that actually use the google.com domain (as most other Google’s services).
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Massive Script Injection (k985ytv)

23 Aug 11   Filed in Short Attack Reviews with 1 Comment

I’d like to point webmasters at a great article on the Armorize blog. It is about a new massive script injection attack that seems to have affected a few thousand websites. In my post, I will summarize the information specifically for webmasters.
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Two Tweet Weeks: August 8-21, 2011

22 Aug 11   Filed in Tweet Week with 1 Comment

Selected short messages and links you might have missed if you don’t follow me on Twitter.

TimThumb attacks, program for responsible hosting providers, analyses of black hat SEO campaigns, osCommerce tips, 4 years of Safe Browsing data »»

Following the Black Hat SEO Traces

14 Aug 11   Filed in Tips and Tricks, Website exploits with 6 Comments

This is a follow up to my last week’s post about hacked WordPress blogs and poisoned Google Images search results. Cyber-criminals infiltrated 4,000+ self-hosted WP blogs and created doorway pages that would redirect visitors coming from Google Images search to scareware sites. A few days ago I posted a short update to let you know that Google has removed the doorway pages from its index. I also promised to share some new interesting details about that black hat SEO campaign. So here we go!
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