The state of website security has been steadily improving over the last few months. Website owners and administrators are beginning to wake up to the fact that malicious hackers can use legitimate, benign, websites to spread malware on the Internet. However, there is along way to go.

Just recently we have seen a spike in the number of incidents associated with LizaMoon infections we documented a while back. We have recorded approximately 6.3 million websites infected by malware as part of this SQL injection attack.

Read about LizaMoon in our first report: LizaMoon Hack: Mass SQL Injection

What links are injected?
Some of the most popular pieces of malware are being injected as scripts.

Samples are listed below:

src=hxxp://bookvoxy.com/ur.php
src=hxxp://online-stats201.info/ur.php
src=hxxp://vcvsta.com/ur.php
src=hxxp://asweds.com/ur.php

Additional samples closely associated with the LizaMoon infection:

hxxp://multi-stats.info/ur.php
hxxp://alisa-carter.com/ur.php
hxxp://google-stats50.info/ur.php
hxxp://tadygus.com/ur.php
hxxp://google-stats49.info/ur.php
hxxp://google-stats50.info/ur.php
hxxp://milapop.com/ur.php
hxxp://pop-stats.info/ur.php
hxxp://sol-stats.info/ur.php
hxxp://worid-of-books.com/ur.php
hxxp://google-server12.info/ur.php
hxxp://online-guest.info/ur.php
hxxp://google-stats48.info/ur.php
hxxp://general-st.info/ur.php
hxxp://stats-master111.info/ur.php

Which sites are aiding the attack?
This blog entry (thanks, Dynamoo!) confirms our findings that these links are not only used in the distribution of malware but also in SEO poisoning campaigns.

Below is a list of sites used to spread the fraudulent SEO campaign as well as distribute malware.

bookmono.com
bookmylo.com
bookaros.com
bookarra.com
booknunu.com
bookavio.com
bookgusa.com
bookmonn.com
bookpolo.com
bookdolo.com
bookfula.com
booksoco.com
bookvoxy.com
booksolo.com
booktuba.com
bookvila.com
bookvivi.com
booksgou.com

Who owns these malicious sites?
The registrant for these fake sites is a common entity:

James Northone (jamesnorthone@hotmailbox.com)
+1.5168222749
fax: +1.5168222749
128 Lynn Court
Plainview, NY 1180
USA

How do I protect my site?
Webmasters and administrators should search for instances of each malicious link in their sites to ensure that they remove all occurrences of the injected links. More importantly, it is critical to identify the cause of the SQL injection that allowed the site to be compromised.

StopTheHacker.com customers are protected against these kind of threats. If you would like more information on how to protect your website, please feel free to contact us. You can also visit our services page to protect your website right now.

Till next time…

Report, Security lizamoon, malware, seo poisoning, sql injection

Today, we’ll expand on our previous post which described SEO poisoning. Hackers are using this relatively new technique to lure users into visiting malicious websites with a vengeance.

SEO poisoning is a method by which hackers can get a malicious link or URL, indexed by a search engine. When users search for terms that match the context of the malicious link, unsuspecting web surfers are often shown malicious links which divert them to harmful websites that can attempt ID theft, install malware, or worse. SEO poisoning is definitely a growing trend. It is becoming a vector of choice for hackers.

How Does It Happen?
A malicious hacker will try to find a vulnerability in the website (XSS and SQLi, for example) or hosting infrastructure which will allow upload of malicious code or modification of the behavior of the web application. Once this is achieved the hacker can insert malicious URLs into the web page which will be indexed by search engines such as Google.

Hackers can compromise a website using trojans or spyware installed on local computers which are used to make FTP connections to the website. This has been the case with the “Gumblar” variety of attacks, the Media-Temple attacks and the generic “Fake Anti-Virus” attacks which have also been escalating in the past few months. Some of the websites involved with the Fake Anti-Virus attacks link to x3y.ru, a3h.ru, before-life.ru, snoreflash.ru and may more.

Analysis
The screen shot below illustrates a recent instance of hackers using popular keywords from Google search trends to exploit unsuspecting users. In this particular example, the search query was most likely extracted from Google Trends.

Miss Universe 2010 search results being SEO poisoned

We can see that search results for Miss Universe 2010 tickets have been SEO poisoned by malicious hackers. The query results clearly show URLs which redirect users to Fake Anti-Virus websites. Unfortunately, not all of these URLs are were blacklisted by Google leading users to visit an unsafe website with no warning whatsoever.

Combating SEO Poisoning
Hackers now have access to point-and-click SEO poisoning toolkits. Some of which are increasingly sophisticated.

The basic steps that these tookits perform are detailed below:

• Find unsecured websites.
• Exploit vulnerabilities and install the entire toolkit (similar to Beef).
• Scrape Google trends, or contact Command and Control servers to find hot search topics.
• Use Google or another search engine to download legitimate content associated with the search terms, copy the content to malicious pages, which GoogleBot then indexes when it visits the infected site.
• Search engines direct users to fake Anti-Virus or infected sites.

This problem is growing everyday. It is an attractive attack vector for malicious individuals, and hence continues to be exploited often. We will be keeping a close eye on trends related to SEO poisoning.

Till next time…

Report, Security google trends, hijacking, miss universe 2010, seo, seo poisoning

Search engines like Google drive the majority of traffic to websites. Therefore, it is important for webmasters to appear high on search rankings and prominently in search results. To this affect website owners often spend large sums of money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies: using the right keywords, getting linked to by popular sites, getting a dialogue about the website going on good forums and much more.

Overview

The popularity, relevance and importance of a website, which determines where in the search rankings it should appear, can simplistically, thought to be represented by one magic number: the Google PageRank. This article is not about how to calculate, improve or tune your Google PageRank.

This article will discuss how a hacker can break into your site, without you knowing and reduce your Google PageRank, thereby making your website plummet from the top rankings in search engines, making your business lose money and visibility.

An Example

On May 7th, 2010, we reviewed a compromise of one of many sites we scan on a daily basis. This site was attacked by a hacker who had exploited a vulnerability in the web application used to host the website. Once the hacker had identified the specific vulnerability, which was WordPress based, he injected spam links into the source code of the pages on the site.

All the spam links are nicely placed after the main body of the legitimate HTML portion and even starts with a comment tag “<!– google –>”!

Malicious spam links injected into the website.

Conclusion

The affect of this spam link injection was that the PageRank of the legitimate site was potentially reduced since many links on the website now pointed to spam or malicious pages. This could result in lower positioning in search results as displayed on various search engines. This is yet another case where webmasters and administrators, who are already overloaded with many tasks, were either unaware or could not pay attention to the security breach.

At stopthehacker.com we are always available to help. If you have suffered from a breach of this kind and would like to share your experience, please contact us.

Report, Security google, link spam, pagerank, seo, seo poisoning