Government-Supported Internet Site Serves Malware Link

Sophos the security company reports that 'StartUp Britain,' which was introduced online on March 28, 2011, led onto a web-page that served bogus anti-virus software. BBC published this on March 30, 2011.

Said Senior Threat Researcher Paul Baccas of Sophos, the web-link that produced the fake anti-virus serving page was found within an article that discussed Warren Buffet the renowned investor in USA. BBC reported this.

The web-link apparently, led Web-surfers onto an intermediate site called bankling.com, which in turn, led them onto one more page that served the bogus anti-virus application. There, Web-surfers would encounter an alert message stating that malware had infected their PCs so they should take down one recommended fix that in reality was malicious software in disguise.

Users affected were those running Internet Explorer, while remaining browsers, Firefox included, weren't influenced.

Admitting that malware was being spread through the incident, StartUp Britain stated that it had already cleared the malevolent web-link. Specifically according to the group, some problems had arisen in connection with the web-link during the launch of the website and while a solution to the problems was found, any web-link, which wasn't operating as it was supposed to, had been eliminated or corrected. EWeek published this on March 30, 2011.

Stated security experts, the incident had an association with online adverts or 'malvertisements' that cyber-criminals were increasingly using for distributing their badware to users' computers.

Meanwhile, as per Dasient another security company, during Q3-2010, over 1.2m Internet sites were contaminated with malware. And with perpetrators moving away from conventional web-oriented assaults in favor of malvertising assaults, there have been more than 1.5m malvertisements delivered daily.

Further, the latest event covers Spotify a digital music company that became the subject of malvertisement assault spread via an intermediate ad-network. Similarly during February 2011, LSE (London Stock Exchange) produced multiple booby-trapped ads on its website, which recommended visitors to take down a similar bogus anti-malware program.

Nevertheless, Dasient forecasts that there'll be more forceful utilization of bogus anti-virus scams and drive-by downloads by cyber-criminals for targeting end-users as the latter will likely, increasingly surf on social-networking websites during 2011.

Related article: Government Sways in Fresh Data Breach Scandal

» SPAMfighter News - 4/8/2011