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Trojan planted on US Consulate website

Russian roulette

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Webpages of the US Consulate General in St. Petersburg, Russia, were infected by malware earlier this week. The US consulate site was caught up in a much larger hack attack and is not thought to have been targeted as such.

The infected pages have since been cleaned up, reports net security firm Sophos which monitored results of the assault.

The attack on the US consulate was part of a larger campaign by cybercriminals targeting vulnerable web servers. The majority of the 400 compromised web pages hit by the attack were hosted in Russia. Hackers planted malicious scripts on compromised hosts.

After retrieving a copy of one of the infected Consulate pages from an internet cache, virus analysts as Sophos were able to identify the malware script planted on the site as Mal/ObfJS-C, a strain of web nasty that attempts to load further malware from a remote server. This malware includes a Trojan downloader script that attempts to plant backdoor code onto the PCs of surfers with vulnerable machines who visit infected sites.

The attack is described in much greater depth in Sophos's blog here. ®

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Latest Comments
Anonymous Coward

netcraft are wrong

most of the time not a good idea to take what they have as the

server or platform for any indication of the actual server or platform

fibbing to them is standard operating procedure now for a simple

minded reason which might occur most of you. In any event it doesn't

appear to work as a deterrent.

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@Remy Redert

> Called patching, antivirus, firewalls etc. Surely even you in your ignorance has heard of these?

I doubt he's ignorant and yes, he probably has heard of them - but surely you're just chanting the typical Windows fanboy mantra. What's astonishing is that no-one's tried lynching Gates & Co. for forcing users to jump through these hoops, despite the promises of "improved" security with each release. Why *are* there so many botnets of compromised Windows machines? Ah wait; of course - that's all the fault of the *users* and not the OS...

You buy Windows, and *then* you have buy the extra stuff/learn hoop jumping to make it secure. Wouldn't things be simpler if Microsoft just did as they promised?

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@@Rahmi Guldahl

> Maybe they *should* have changed to Windows, if they wanted to be secure.

Idiot. If you'd bothered checking the details for Mal/ObfJS-C, you would have seen that it affects Windows. As per sodding usual.

I think Rahmi Guldahl is spot on the button.

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