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Loading ...Hackers focus on blogs, email, websites
San Diego (ip-192.com): In the second half of 2009, cyber crooks focused on rigging the Internet with booby-trapped blog commentary, chat rooms, email messages and websites, according to a Websense report.
Search engine optimization poisoning attacks target top searches, enabling hackers to drive traffic to their sites. Crocks in the first half of 2009 focused on mass injection attacks like Gumblar, Beladen and Nine Ball that led to a sharp rise in the number of malicious Web sites. The second half of 2009 saw increased efforts by malware authors to drive victims straight to them.
Attackers replaced their traditional scattergun approach with focused efforts on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages. In addition, attackers continued to capitalize on Web site reputation and exploiting user trust, with 71 percent of Web sites with malicious code revealed to be legitimate sites that had been compromised, according to Websense.
"Attackers are following every real-time event that is happening and changing, minute-by-minute, their rankings in Google search," said Websense security research manager Stephan Chenette. "They use botnets nowadays to give them control over search engine rankings. They are jumping on the band wagon of any big event; at a drop of a dime they can instruct botnets to run websites and raise those links high in searches."
Web security intelligence remains a critical component of any email and data security strategy as illustrated by the continued popularity of blended threats (spam emails with embedded URLs, for example). During the second half of 2009, Websense Security Labs discovered:
- 13.7 percent of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends) lead to malware;
- 95 percent of user-generated comments to blogs, chat rooms and message boards are spam or malicious;
- 35 percent of malicious Web attacks included data-stealing code;
- 58 percent of data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web;
- 85.8 percent of all emails were spam;
- Malicious Web sites grew by 225 percent.
Websense gathered its data from a Threat Seeker Network that every hour scans more than 40 million Web sites for malicious code and nearly 10 million emails for nefarious content.
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