Tag Archives: Denis Sinegubko

Crafty Web Skimming Domain Spoofs “https”

March 11, 2020
37 Comments

Earlier today, KrebsOnSecurity alerted the 10th largest food distributor in the United States that one of its Web sites had been hacked and retrofitted with code that steals credit card and login data. While such Web site card skimming attacks are not new, this intrusion leveraged a sneaky new domain that hides quite easily in a hacked site’s source code: “http[.]ps” (the actual malicious domain does not include the brackets, which are there to keep readers from being able to click on it).

Plesk 0Day For Sale As Thousands of Sites Hacked

July 10, 2012
46 Comments

Hackers in the criminal underground are selling an exploit that extracts the master password needed to control Parallels’ Plesk Panel, a software suite used to remotely administer hosted servers at a large number of Internet hosting firms. The attack comes amid reports from multiple sources indicating a spike in Web site compromises that appear to trace back to Plesk installations.

Twitter Bots Target Tibetan Protests

March 20, 2012
10 Comments

Twitter bots — automated accounts that auto-follow and send junk tweets hawking questionable wares and services — can be an annoyance to anyone who has even a modest number of followers. But increasingly, Twitter bots are being used as a tool to suppress political dissent, as evidenced by an ongoing flood of meaningless tweets directed at hashtags popular for tracking Tibetan protesters who are taking a stand against Chinese rule.

It’s not clear how long ago the bogus tweet campaigns began, but Tibetan sympathizers say they recently noticed that several Twitter hashtags related to the conflict — including #tibet and #freetibet — are now so constantly inundated with junk tweets from apparently automated Twitter accounts that the hashtags have ceased to become a useful way to track the conflict.

Scammers Swap Google Images for Malware

May 6, 2011
84 Comments

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a single tainted digital image may be worth thousands of dollars for computer crooks who are abusing weaknesses in Google’s Image Search service to foist malicious software.

For several weeks, a number of readers have complained that clicking on Google Images search results redirected them to Web pages that pushed rogue anti-virus or “scareware” through misleading security alerts and warnings. On Wednesday, the SANS Internet Storm Center posted a blog entry saying they, too, were receiving reports of Google Image searches leading to fake anti-virus. According to SANS, the attackers have compromised an unknown number of sites with malicious scripts that create garbage Web pages filled with the top search terms from Google Trends. The malicious scripts also fetch images from third-party sites and include them in the junk pages alongside the relevant search terms, so that the automatically generated Web page contains legitimate-looking content.

Hiding from Anti-Malware Search Bots

April 23, 2010
6 Comments

Malicious hackers spend quite a bit of energy and time gaming the Internet search engines in a bid to have their malware-laden sites turn up on the first page of search results for hot, trending news topics. Increasingly, though, computer criminals are taking steps to keep search bots at bay, particularly with legitimate Web sites that have been hacked and booby-trapped with hostile code.