Hackers compromise 70,000 legitimate websites to push malware
Friday, August 28, 2009
As many as 70,000 websites have been compromised by hackers in the last week with a malicious iframe that can redirect site visitors to other sites containing Trojan malware.
Security researchers at ScanSafe said the affected websites are mostly based in China, Canada, the UK and India. Some of the compromised sites include feedzilla.com, latindiscover.com and a number of charitable and nursing facilities, including howellcarecenter.com, sweetgrassvillagealf.com, foodsresourcebank.org and morningsideassistedliving.com.
Mass compromises of legitimate websites through an attack known as SQL injection have spiked upward as of April, according to security researchers at Google. Google said on its online security blog that the number of compromised sites on its list of malware-hosting URLs has grown to more than 300,000 sites this year.
In January 2008, more than 1.2 percent of all Google search queries contained at least one malicious URL, but that has fallen to less than 0.8 percent today.
"We noticed an increase around May 2009 and that growth may be due to the appearance of a larger number of compromised websites," Google's Niels Provos said on the Google security blog.
Google search, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari use Google's Safe Browsing API to warn users when they are clicking on a URL known to contain malware.
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