Another week, another fast-moving Twitter attack. Just days after engineers stamped out a nasty cross site scripting hole in the company’s Web page, the company had to contend with a worm that used an attack called “cross site request forgery” to post salacious messages and malicious links on victims’ accounts.
HED: MyOpera found to host malwareBAK: The My Opera free Web hosting service is hosting malicious code, just the latest prominent hosting service to be gamed by malware distributors. Less than a month after Google’s Code hosting service was found to be hosting and serving malicious executables, a search of Opera Software’s My Opera free hosting service has also turned up malicious programs, according to a researcher at Kaspersky Lab. My Opera, a free online hosting service for users of the Opera Web browser, played host to a PHP based IRC botnet, according to a post by Dmitry Bestuzhev, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab. The bot appears to have originated in Brazil, based on an analysis of the code, though its not clear who posted it to the My Opera hosting service or when, Bestuzhev said. In August, Web security firm zScaler found a number of malicious programs hosted on servers used to power Google Code, a free, Web based platform that provides tools and resources for developers who want to work on projects related to Google’s various open source software. The company claimed that regular anti malware scans of its servers failed to spot the malicious programs, which included a malicious downloader programs, Trojan horses, backdoor programs and password stealing key logging programs that target massively multi player online games like World of Warcraft. In a blog post, Bestuzhev said that free hosting services are popular among criminals who are looking to upload and disseminate malicious programs. (http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/2303/Google_Mozilla_and_now_Opera_Whos_next) Hosting domains like fileave, ripway, rapidshare and 110mb are common dumping grounds for malicious programs, he wrote. The My Opera free Web hosting service is hosting malicious code, just the latest prominent hosting service to be gamed by malware distributors.
Researchers have discovered that a page on the My Opera community Web site is hosting malware related to an IRC botnet. The discovery comes just a couple of weeks after malicious code also was found on Google Code servers.
Google is using automated warnings to alert users of its GMAIL messaging service about wide spread attempts to access personal mail accounts from Internet addresses in China. The warnings may indicate wholesale spying by the Chinese government a year after the Google Aurora attacks or simply random attacks. Victims include one leading privacy activist.
A glut of stolen data — combined with innovation and cutthroat
competition among vendors — is conspiring to keep prices for stolen
account numbers exceptionally low. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]
In the wake of a high profile (though harmless) cross site scripting attack launched from Twitter.com’s Web site, the New York Times is sponsoring a debate about the security of online social networks that offers some harsh criticism of the micro blogging site.
ESPN’s Fantasy Football site is riddled with flaws that allow players to rig games, a security researcher says. Read the full article. [The Register]
Cisco has released its twice-yearly set of security updates for its switches and routers. There are six advisories in all, each one covering a different component of the Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS), which powers the routers. Read the full article. [IDG News Service]
Findings from Veracode’s report “State of Software Security Report: Volume 2.” show that overall quality of
applications remains poor, with 57 percent failing to meet acceptable
levels of security. New results demonstrate that cloud/web-based
applications are the most commonly scrutinized, and with good reason: 80
percent of web applications would not pass a PCI audit. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
Call it “Frankencookie:” a security researcher has released a tracking cookie that he claims is nearly impossible to remove. Dubbed “evercookie,” it is designed to raise awareness about the ease with which Web site operators can evade privacy tools designed to eliminate shield visitors’ privacy.
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