Posted on 09/15/2007 1:59:33 PM PDT by yorkie
A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday.
This is the first time that Storm has taken to the Web for its victims, said Dan Hubbard, head of research at San Diego-based Websense Inc. "The big news is that Storm has added infecting sites to its arsenal," said Hubbard.
Storm debuted in January but only cracked the top malware lists early this summer, and has become infamous for its ability to adapt its infection strategies.
"They have a knack for latching onto the latest newsworthy events and capitalizing on the public interest in them," Symantec Corp. researcher Hon Lau said last month. "And if no newsworthy events are happening at the time, then they will just make them up."
Until now, Storm has infected users via files attached to e-mail or through links embedded in spam. The change noticed by Websense's scanners, however, means that Storm's backers have moved to other attack vectors -- in particular, compromised Web sites that sport malicious IFRAMEs. Users visiting such sites are instantly infected with the Trojan if their browsers are not patched against whatever exploit the IFRAME code is throwing out.
According to Hubbard, several hundred sites have been compromised by Storm's makers, then seeded with IFRAMES that can inject the Trojan into vulnerable PCs.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
I got notified of a blocked virus at Instapundit last week. Wonder if this was it.
Watch out, we will likely be attacked
I was not aware that Free Republic is a “Republican Party” website.
Libs!just cant handle the truth.
Thankfully, we aren’t into wearing tinfoil hats like the left. This could impact readership and browsing if it weren’t a DU plant. Most of us expect our firewalls and virus sniffers to catch this stuff not big brother.
I would hope that FReepers are more self reliant than to be afraid to share the truth even is the left will stoop to any means to try to silence us.
I was on the phone with Geek Squad for 4 hours last night because of that damn Trojan virus, spyware, whatever it is. My system is all clean now but some sites are really slow opening up, while others are fast. Oy.
Hmmm.. running Opera 9.x and Mepis Linux at the moment. No problems so far and none expected. Of course, keeping the drives unmounted also helps. *grin*
Oh gee, ain’t that special!
Me too. I couldn't get on to FR earlier this afternoon, but had no trouble getting on any other sites I visit. My computer has been slow today too. I am scanning my system right now to see if there is any problem.
So “several hundred sites have been compromised” but the only site highlighted is an initially unnamed Republican Party Web site (gasp!) Waaaaay down in the article the website is finally identified as the GOP site for a congressional district in Wisconsin and we’re told the site was immediately repaired upon notification that they were infected.
This article was written to intentionally inflict FUD about GOP websites.
Same here. I couldn’t get onto FR for quite some time. All other sites I watch closely were not affected.
Istapundit, Newsbusters, Don Surber, Drudge, etc seemed OK.
.
After cleaning my machine and rebooting, the problem persists.
No other sites have slowed to a crawl like that... Has anyone else had that problem today?
FR was down for a bit around 3:30 or so. If you’ve had problems with it, it’s probably not a virus.
FR is having server problems, evidentally:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1897092/posts?q=1&;page=1
This is closely related to the MSM virus.
H0w CaN I -. TelL iF My%^&#* C0MpteRs INfecTED ??++..,+ ==’— ...
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