Fighting malware and spam

More 'trusted sites' carrying iframe danger

Big wave of website infections could affect tens of thousands of sites, Trend Micro latest victim.

Earlier this week McAfee reported a major outbreak of website infections, with as many as 20,000 sites thought to have been hit with a single wave of malicious iframe insertion attacks. Since then, Trend Micro's website has been reported as having been subjected to iframe insertion, with a selection of malware information pages thought to have been compromised and used to push drive-by downloads.

The McAfee report, here, describes the attack, using JavaScript and iframes to exploit a series of vulnerabilities, eventually leading malware downloads. A follow-up, here, gives more details.

On Wednesday Trend Micro released a warning that some of their pages had been infected and may have infected visitors, advising anyone who may have visited certain areas of the site to check their systems with updated anti-virus software. The infected pages are thought to have all been in the malware descriptions area of the site, both Japanese and English versions, and may have been live from Sunday until their discovery on Wednesday. The pages have since been taken offline.

A report on the Trend incident is in Japan's Yomiuri Shinbun, here, with a warning message from Trend (in Japanese) here. More details, including a list of the pages thought to have been infected, can be found in a Sophos blog entry here.

14 March 2008

Tags: drive-by download, iframe, trend micro.   

3 comments

As a system admin, you have to be proactive in these situation, by preventing suspicious outbound connections (.cn domains), and monitor the FW/Proxy logs for any. Here, I've got a checklist to address the IFRMAE attacks

http://extremesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/03/iframe-attacks-actions-to-be-taken.html

by Aa'ed Alqarta, 21 March 2008, 08:06

Since IFrame attacks targeted reputable sites, URL filter needed to be updated with the list of compromised sites - for the filtering to be effective. Are there any resource or script to obtain such a list? Thanks.

by William Rothwell, 26 March 2008, 14:26

To my best of knowledge, such a list doesn't exist*: most of these attacks are carried out very fast and it would take some time for a script to find and index these sites. Moreover, many infected sites do update their server software following an attack; hence if would be unfair to keep them blacklisted. It is best to make sure you have up-to-date anti-malware software running. Or, if you want to be really safe, use a browser plugin that blocks JavaScript and Flash by default.

* I think there are people who keep lists of the malware-serving sites (the ones that the iframes point to), URL filter might use these lists. But again, these sites change fast and I personally wouldn't rely on a URL blacklist only.

by Martijn Grooten, 26 March 2008, 17:37

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