Fergie's Tech Blog

Cyber Crooks Hijack Activities of Large Web-Hosting Firm

Brian Krebs writes on Security Fix:

Organized crime groups have modified a significant share of the Web sites operated by one of the Internet's largest Web hosting companies to launch cyber attacks against visitors, Security Fix has learned.

Last month, Phoenix-based IPOWER Inc. was featured prominently in an unflattering report by StopBadware.org, a joint effort by Google, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University's Internet Institute. StopBadware has identified more than 90,000 sites that attempt to install malicious software on visitors' computers via Internet browser security holes or programming tricks. When a user tries to click on one of these sites after they appear as Google search results, Google posts a warning page stating that the site has been spotted trying to attack previous visitors.

John Palfrey, a professor of Internet law at Harvard, said the report showed that about 90 percent of the sites flagged as serving "badware" appeared to be otherwise legitimate sites that had been hijacked by criminals.

StopBadware found that about 10 percent of the sites in its database were operated by IPOWER. Security Fix found that the problem at IPOWER may be far worse than StopBadware indicated.

posted by Fergie @ 5/23/2007 12:05:00 PM