Fergie's Tech Blog

iPowerWeb Smackdown: Web Hosting Providers Let Security Sag

Lisa Vaas writes on eWeek:

Riddle: What do the city of Plainville, Kan., and the Transportation Authority of Marin County, Calif., have in common?

Answer: a Web hosting provider that can't seem to keep its DNS servers clean.

Both .gov domains in the past few months have seen their sites seeded with redirects to malicious servers in other countries that have pushed pornography, malware, Viagra ads and the like to site visitors.

TAM and Plainville are, in fact, two examples of what security researchers are calling an epidemic of sites being compromised through their hosting providers and injected with malicious Web attacker paths that lead to tool kits such as Icepack, Neosploit and Web Attacker. These malcode tool kits serve up anywhere from five to a dozen or more exploits that latch on to site visitors' machines through their browsers to infest the systems with malware.

posted by Fergie @ 12/04/2007 08:27:00 AM