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2M New Websites a Year Compromised To Serve Malware

Posted by kdawson on from the wave-upon-wave dept.

SkiifGeek writes "Sophos claims that they are detecting 6,000 new sites daily that have been compromised to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors, with 80% of site owners not aware that they have been compromised — though this figure is probably on the low side. With increasingly vocal arguments being put forward by security experts criticizing the performance and capability of site validation tools (though many of these experts offer their own tools and services for similar capabilities), and rising levels of blended attacks, perhaps it is time you reviewed the security of your site and what might be hiding in infrequently used directories."

7 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. How to Check a LAMP Server? by MankyD · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Everytime I read about a new form of server malware, I try to check a LAMP server that I run. So far I've come up clean but I've hardly done a full inspection. Anyone know of a good way to scan a set up? Sophos says that they are detecting thousands of new sites - how are they scanning them?

    --
    -dave
    http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
    1. Re:How to Check a LAMP Server? by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I thought about this myself. One possible solution that I considered would be to maintain a local list of files on your server and their CRC/Hash values. A script on the server would scan all the files and output a similar list than you could then check against your local copy and would quickly identify any new or changed files. This could be set to a cron job to do periodic scans or just initiate a manual scan whenever.

      Might not be the best solution but it should be easy to implement. Larger sites can do incremental scans. It would be harder to detect corruption of databases, though, unless you know what to look for or have a concrete way of validating the contents.
      =Smidge=

  2. Hmm, time to improve the common tools by davidwr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps the time has come to harden the "common stacks" so certain switches are off.

    For example, once you set up your web site, "lock it" so if there are any changes to files or directories that shouldn't change, the site will break in a non-harmful way rather than be compromised.

    If and when these files need updating, the "unlock" process should be done using a tool independent of the main web-server process, perhaps by using a different web-server process running on a different port or even a process on a different computer that validates the request then passes it on to the main web server.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  3. Completely useless. by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Until they release the fricking list of IP addresses or Domain names.

    I would love to put that list in my squid blocking file to protect my users.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  4. what does this look like from the client? by oni · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If I run FF and keep it patched, am I safe? If I did get compromised, what would the symptoms be?

    I tend to think that keeping my OS patched keeps me pretty safe, but there's always a delay after a new vulnerability is discovered before the patches come out (the zero day) and what concerns me is that if someone has a very large network of compromised web servers, they can roll out a zero day vulnerability to all of them and do a lot of damage.

    As to symptoms, I think spyware used to be the big problem, and infected computers would have popups and such. But now I think that infected machines will be used primarily to send spam. Is that correct?

  5. Yes... by SigmundFloyd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sophos claims that they are detecting 6,000 new sites daily that have been compromised to serve malware
    ...but do they run Linux?
    --
    Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
  6. Vendor FUD or Real? by a-zarkon! · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I for one would like some description of how they're detecting these 6000 new sites per day. Also, what are they considering a website? Do they include bot systems that configured to listen on port 80 as part of the worm propagation and command/control? That's not really a website in my opinion, but it may be in theirs. It would be great if they published a list of the 42000 new websites they have discovered over the past 7 days, you know just to back up their claim. Wouldn't hurt to notify the owners of those sites that they've got a problem.

    Absent more detail, I am calling shenanigans on this statistic, Sophos, and the Register. I am soooo sick of the FUD.

    Harumph!