Equifax Website Hacked Again, this Time To Redirect To Fake Flash Update (arstechnica.com)

For several hours on Wednesday Equifax's website was compromised again, this time to deliver fraudulent Adobe Flash updates, which when clicked, infected visitors' computers with adware that was detected by only three of 65 antivirus providers, reports Dan Goodin at Ars Technica. From the report: Randy Abrams, an independent security analyst by day, happened to visit the site Wednesday evening to contest what he said was false information he had just found on his credit report. Eventually, his browser opened up a page on the domain hxxp:centerbluray.info. He was understandably incredulous. The site that previously gave up personal data for virtually every US person with a credit history was once again under the control of attackers, this time trying to trick Equifax visitors into installing crapware Symantec calls Adware.Eorezo. Knowing a thing or two about drive-by campaigns, Abrams figured the chances were slim he'd see the download on follow-on visits. To fly under the radar, attackers frequently serve the downloads to only a select number of visitors, and then only once. Abrams tried anyway, and to his amazement, he encountered the bogus Flash download links on at least three subsequent visits. Update: Equifax said on Thursday it was taking one of its web pages offline as its security team looks into reports of another potential cyber breach.

Comments

Re:This may not have been Equifax

[Walking The Walk]

This sounds suspiciously like a DNS poisoning attack, which could have been impacting his ISP, but targeting a domain used by Equifax. Such attacks are completely outside of the control of the target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That's a possibility, but the story is subtitled "Malware researcher encounters bogus download links during multiple visits.", and one would hope a malware researcher would have considered it. The article says it could be due to an ad the site was displaying:

It's not yet clear precisely how the Flash download page got displayed. The group-sourced analysis here and this independent assessment from researcher Kevin Beaumont—both submitted in the hours after this post went live—make a strong case that Equifax was working with a third-party ad network or analytics provider that's responsible for the redirects. In that case, the breach, technically speaking, isn't on the Equifax website.