UK Communist website abused by Chinese hackers

Moaist malware mayhem

By John Leyden, 5th June 2009

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Updated The website of the Communist Party Of Britain has been infected with malicious code.

Infection by the iFrame-F script coincided with local and European election in the UK, marking a time when the minority party website would have had far more visitors than normal.

The affected file on the website is associated with serving up Microsoft Silverlight script, suggesting an important part of the site's multimedia environment was affected by the security breach, net security firm Sophos reports. The malicious code (inserted in a file called silverlight.js) serves up an iFrame that points to a malicious Google-spoofing website in China.

"The Communist Party's website infection is invisible to the naked eye, but buried inside the code of a plugin for their webpages," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "The code is designed to deliver funky animation and video effects to website visitors - but actually tries to invisibly download malicious code from web servers based in China and Russia."

Paul Baccas, senior threat researcher at Sophos, explained that iFrame-F was one of the most common forms of web-based attack detected by Sophos. "The majority of infections through this route come from SQL injection attacks against vulnerable websites, but in this case only one file appears to be infected, suggesting a specific hack," Baccas told El Reg.

Sophos has notified the Communist Party of problems with its website by email and phone but is yet to receive a response. We've relayed this warning, alongside a request for comment. ®