“Unprecedented” Cyber Attack Foiled But Experts Fear Criminals Will Try Again
Posted November 29, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Your favourite search engine might have been turned into a booby trap waiting to explode your computer, if experts hadn’t caught the problem in time. But they’re warning you this could be the opening salvo in a new series of online wars.
The latest ploy to destroy worked like this. Hackers set up websites designed to fool search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo into thinking they were legitimate online destinations that had thousands of previous visitors. So anyone entering common terms like “Christmas gifts” would be referred to a website that appeared to contain useful and real information.
The perpetrators apparently used several techniques, like spam comments on blogs, to get their pseudo-sites moved to the top of the page results on all the services. But when users clicked on the links, they’d be taken to a place containing endless amount of malware, malicious programs that would exploit holes in Internet Explorer and instantly infect their machines without their knowing it.
Other terms researchers found with the malevolent motives were “holiday shopping fun” “infinity” and, troublingly, “hospice”. But there were many others not associated with health or the holiday, representing up to 40,000 possible pages.
Google detected the problem after 24 hours and removed the links, but it’s not clear if Yahoo and MSN have been completely cleansed. Most of the sites were based in China, and there may have been thousands of them that were just a few days old.
While malicious infecting sites aren’t new, this technique is. Those who detected the plot are calling it “unprecedented,” and warn it’s a new frontier in the cyber wars that won’t be going away. What can you do? Make sure all your patches are up to date and consider switching to Firefox, a browser that doesn’t yet have as many security flaws. And beware of any addresses that end in “.cn”, the web’s short form for China, although some blame this latest assault on Russian organized crime.
It’s the second warning of the day from experts, who also revealed another troubling net-connected scenario. Internet security firm McAfee issued a report on Thursday warning a “cyber cold war” is coming and computer threats may wind up being the world’s biggest security problem in the coming years.
It claims more than 120 countries are studying ways to use the web as a weapon to go after stock markets and government computer systems. It calls China the leader in the attacks and says its methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect. The country denies the allegation but the experts say they’re not the only ones on this new cyber battlefront.
“Attacks have progressed from initial curiosity probes to well-funded and well-organized operations for political, military, economic and technical espionage,” the report states. And it predicts that recent attacks aimed at crippling the fragile infrastructure of countries are “just the tip of the iceberg”.
“Cybercrime is now a global issue,” agrees McAfee’s Jeff Green.”It has evolved significantly and is no longer just a threat to industry and individuals but increasingly to national security.”
