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Hackers plant malware on Jerusalem Post website

Scattergun opportunists

Hackers compromised the website of the Jerusalem Post on Monday so that it served up malware.

The attack relied on planting scripts on the site itself, rather than the more common tactic of compromising its ad-serving system to serve tainted ads. The attack ultimately attempted to dump Windows-based malware on the Windows PCs of visiting surfers.

Sophos - which was among the first to document the attack - defines this strain of malware as Behav-290.

Paul Baccas (AKA Pob) a virus researcher at Sophos reckons the attack is more likely to be down to opportunists than a reaction to heightened tensions in the Middle East over recent days, following deaths on a flotilla of boats bound for Gaza.

"In the current climate some will assume that the site has been hacked by a politically motivated hacker," Baccas writes. "However, in my experience the majority of hacks like this are done via a scattergun approach and it was just bad luck (and bad website security) that meant that the Jerusalem Post was the victim." ®

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