Euro 2008 sales site in drive-by download attack

Caught offside with Trojan downloader code

By John Leyden, 31st March 2008

Hackers have successfully planted malware on a website selling tickets for the upcoming Euro 2008 Championships.

The site of European ticket re-sale firm euroticketshop.com was infected by Trojan horse malware in a bid to infect soccer-loving surfers with insecure PCs. This drive-by malware style of attack is growing increasingly popular.

Visitors attempting to purchase tickets through the site were exposed to a malicious script which is embedded on some of its web pages. This malware (detected by net security firm Sophos as ObfJS-R) then attempts to download further items of malware from another remote website.

It's unclear at the time of writing whether euroticketshop.com has purged the infection. We dropped the site a note but are yet to hear back.

A growing number of legitimate web pages are now being compromised by crooks as they attempt to infect more computers. Sophos said it detects a new infected web page as often as once every 14 seconds. A large majority (83 per cent) of these infected web pages are hosed on legitimate sites.

Miscreants take advantage of large sporting events to increase the potency of their attacks. In 2007, the website of the Miami Dolphins, host of last year's Superbowl, was compromised in the days leading up to the event in order to infect visiting fans.

"This is not the first time that hackers have attempted to capitalise on sporting events, and unfortunately in the run up to the competition this summer, we're likely to see more sites like this being hacked, as well as other scams preying on football fans' fervour," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. ®

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