Rotating Iframe URLs – One a Minute
Earlier this week, Sucuri wrote about auto generated iframes in hacked WordPress blogs. The malicious PHP code fetched the iframe URLs from a remote server (hxxp://82 .200 .204 .151/config.inc.php) on-the-fly every time someone loaded infected web pages. This trick helped regularly update the malicious URLs without having to change the code on each hacked site individually. All the URLs had the same format http://<domain-of-a-hacked -site.com>/news/faults-ending.php. For example, hxxp://brewerstire .com/news/faults-ending.php .
This reminded me of another ongoing attack that also rotates iframe URLs in a similar way. However it has some distinguishing features that make it worth it to describe it separately.
Continue »»
Cloaking: Think Outside of [Your] Box
Cloaking in SEO is defined as a technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser (Wikipedia). But in case of hacked sites, cloaking is more tricky than just different content for search engines and for real users. It can also be different content for different types of users. Moreover, the internal implementation is usually hidden (cloaked) from webmasters of compromised sites.
This post will be about one of such site hacks that involved SEO cloaking and used quite an interesting trick to alter page content.
Continue »»
Rich Snippets in Black Hat SEO
Competition in search marketing can be tough. Regardless of number of businesses/products/services relevant to a specific keyword there is only one top position and unless it’s your site at the top you miss out on the hefty share of the search traffic generated by that keyword. The lower the result is displayed the less attention it gets.
Even if you are in “business” of black hat SEO and can use whatever dirty tricks you like, you still can’t guarantee the top position for the most popular keywords since there are already many established reputable sites and other black hats competing for the same keywords. But if you can’t always get the top position, you can still try to make your results look more attractive than the rest and increase their click through rate, right? Right! And this post will be about one of such tricks
Continue »»
RunForestRun Now Encrypts Legitimate JS Files
A few days ago Jindrich Kubec (Avast) pinged me that the RunForestRun malware changed the domain generating algorithm (DGA) and now uses waw.pl subdomains (instead of .ru) in malicious URLs.
I decided to take a look at the new scripts and found quite a few very interesting changes. This post will be about those changes.
Continue »»
Careless Webmasters as WordPress Hosting Providers for Spammers
Foks, a frequent contributer to my investigations, recently pointed me at an interesting black hat SEO campaign where thousands of hacked WordPress blogs and Joomla sites were used to create doorways promoting online stores selling various “slimming pills” and fake luxury goods.
During the last few years I saw many attacks where cyber criminals created large spammy sites in subdirectories of hacked legitimate sites. It’s an easy way to create millions of doorway pages on thousands of established domains with good reputation for free (owners of hacked sites pay for hosting, bandwidth and domains) — typical parasitic behavior. Webmasters normally only visit pages they created themselves and rarely check what happens in subdirectories so they may not notice spammy sections for months. Sometimes such sections may be significantly larger than legitimate sections of hacked websites and attract much more search traffic.
The back end of such rogue sections is usually some doorway generating script along with rewrite rules in .htaccess or a simple blogging engine like FlatPress that doesn’t require a database. The only requirement of such solutions is PHP so they will work on most websites.
However this time spammers chose WordPress as a back end for their doorways. After all, if they hack a WordPress blog, the server is guranteed to be compatible with WordPress and all they need to do to install a new instance is get MySQL password from existing wp-config.php and chose a different table prefix for their WordPress database.
Here’s how the attack works »»
Malware Piggybacks on Automatic WordPress Updates
Most WordPress bloggers know the “Always keep your WordPress blog up-to-date” mantra. To make upgrades painless, WordPress developers introduced the “Automatic Update” features in version 2.7. A blog admin only needs to visit the “Update WordPress” page (Tools -> Update) and click on the “Update Automatically” button. That’s it! Easy!
Sometimes I see how webmasters misinterpret the importance of upgrades for WordPress security. They expect that if they upgrade a hacked blog, it will immediately become clean and secure. Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. Upgrades can only clean core WordPress files, leaving backdoors, infected themes, plugins and database records intact. That’s why it is important to clean up your site before the upgrade.
Moreover, a few days ago I came across a new massive infection (more than 1,000 currently known infected blogs) that hijacks the “Automatic Update” feature and makes it the event that triggers blog re-infection.
Continue »»
Lorem Ipsum and Twitter Trends in Malware. Update.
A few weeks ago I published an article about an attack that hosted malware on a fast flux network of infected PCs and used a clever algorithm based on Twitter trends to generate four new hard-to-predict domain names every day.
Shortly after that I was contacted by foks, who shared some interesting information. He conducted his own investigation and found out how hackers injected those scripts into legitimate web pages. He also found a new (buggy) version of the malicious script.
Continue »»
About this blog
Occasional posts from the developer of
Unmask Parasites about things that hackers already know and site owners should know (if they don't want to be victims).
Exploit reviews, security tips, and all that jazz.
