Slashdot Mirror
BBC Site Used as IE Attack Lure
capt turnpike writes "The hits just keep coming... according to eWEEK.com, someone is using actual excerpts of BBC news stories to 'launch drive-by downloads of bots, spyware, back doors and other Trojan downloaders.' One example is a story blurb masking the download and installation of a keylogger -- with no user interaction. And it doesn't even tell you it loves you."
So... they used BBC news as bait... WOW! It's not like they took over the BBC site and used it.
"The hits keep coming in..." Yeah, 1 every hour. The media wants to make this the most critical vulnerability that ever existed. What a joke.
I mean, a known bug is exploited and it's using quoted text from the BBC site.
If they do it again tomorrow with text from nytimes.com would that be another story?
The opposite of progress is congress
(Times like this I'm glad that I use linux ... Until, of course, the next zero-day firefox hole, at which point I'll switch to konqueror or..).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
An IE vulnerability! That's news!
According to This article, using bogus URL's to trick people is still the most effective social engineering trick in the book. Of course, that may not apply to those in the Slashdot community :p
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
You'd have to be crazy to click on them while reading that article.
MY name is James Taylor and I clicked on your link and then the web went down all by itself!
It was taking over by a hostile native american terrorist organization called apache running on Gentoo gnu/linux. Damit hacker! I need to call the FBI over and sue you for this.
http://saveie6.com/
Not really sure why this is even news. After a computer security competition last weekend, I had the chance to talk to professional security auditors, i.e. hackers. The reason I bring it up is that at one point, one of them said that "he had a web page he would like everyone to visit...with firefox." Needless to say, this scared the shit out of me. After pressing for more info of browser related exploits, he said that IE7 is suprisingly solid security-wise. Same goes for Vista, at least the parts of it that are finished (no more ldap). I shudder at the thought of IE pushers trying to convince people to switch away from firefox because it's not secure enough. I don't know, food for thought.
So, what harm is there in bundling the browser with the OS shipped on 90% of the retail PCs in the world? What harm is there in integrating the browser into the core of the operating system?
...let's stop by your bank and credit card accounts on the way to an organized crime hangout and/or third-world country! Fun!
Apparently, if you bundle a half-ass product where only lip service was paid to security, the cost is greater than anyone realizes. IE was crammed in there with the sole purpose of crushing Netscape and dominating the Internet market. It was rushed, with slipshod quality and security only as an afterthough -- and that only by the PR department.
"Where do you want to go today?" seems to have found an answer...
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Hackers Thank God for Microsoft Marketing Policy.
The policy may be designed to make life easier on sysadmins (or, at least, their managers), but it also makes life easier on hackers. I mean, if I had a zero day exploit, I'd start using it on patch day. That way I'd probably have a full month to exploit it before Microsoft released their scheduled patch.
Scheduled monthly patches are fine for non-critical issues, but when you have zero-day drive-by exploits like this, you've got to have a policy that puts user security ahead of marketing hype. Waiting until you have a full-fledged epidemic is not the way to secure your user's future.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Fear of change, basically. The more Microsoft bundles with the OS, the more conditioned vendors are to not bundle or support 3rd-party apps. There is such an entrenched mindset and culture of IE-use and support that, despite the very real possibility that "something else" might be BETTER and cost LESS to support, they're too-scared to try to retrain their techs and reprint the support manuals, scripts, and flowcharts.
You tell a support tech you're using anything other than IE and he'll throw his hands up and try to close the call. It's not in his scripts and you've just fucked up his average call time.
The mentality is that it's more-efficient to support one and only one thing, even if that "one thing" is the worst choice, and results in exponentially-more work in the long-run. It's not like they CAN'T support IE at all, since MS bundles it, and most people are just going to use it. So they're stuck.
Besides, then what would be the incentive to sell everyone copies of Norton Security Suite? That's a lucrative market. As is charging $100/call to walk a user through running Ad-Aware.