Hackers seized by Claudia Sonea

Never ending story of hackers makes you wonder how could are we in mastering the computer. They keep getting better and their motto has never stopped being the more the merrier. Just now a huge campaign of booby-traps websites destined to poison web searches using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information. Therefore Windows users searching terms such as "Christmas gifts" and "hospice" would have fallen prey to the risk that their machine hijacked and personal information plundered. Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software, one of the firms that uncovered the attack, stated that this attack surpasses all other small-scale attempts to subvert search results and it was epic. He added that tens of thousands of domains were used in the vanguard of the attack and most of them were Chinese registered, hosted in the US and were only a couple of days old. The booby-trapped sites looked for vulnerabilities in copies of Microsoft's Internet Explorer used to browse them. In order to appear in the index software used by Google, MSN and Yahoo, hackers had to convince that their domains were good and popular sources of information, said Eckelberry. Thus, they used a special code (comment spam on blogs to push the pages up the search index rankings) to only show up if someone used Google, even though the results were indexed by Yahoo and MSN. Another firm that uncovered the booby-trapped webpages was Security firm Trend Micro and Raimund Genes, its chief technology officer, stated that the malicious software intermittently scrambled the package before it downloaded in order to not be detected. Also, he blamed the Russian Business Network, a hi-tech criminal gang known to favor web-based attacks, as author of the attack. Google managed to remove the malicious web sites from its index, but on Yahoo and MSN there is still consider to turn up, so be careful and watch where you lay your click.

related story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7118452.stm

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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