Archives of Security Breaches

As we often mention here at HackerTarget.com real security is made up of a number of different processes, policies and technologies. If one part of the security picture is missing then your data is vulnerable. Where do you keep your backups? Are they in a secure location? While this example is a fairly rare occurrence, […]

A tool discovered by Sans Security Handlers has shed some light on how 10000 web sites were compromised earlier this year. An automated SQL injection attack that utilized google searches against ASP pages that contained potential sql injection points is at the core of the attack. While we had a general idea about what they […]

A recent trend micro report examines the increasing number of legitimate web sites that are being attacked by cyber criminals. Schools, government and big business are all targets. A compromised web site is then used to deliver malware to any visitor who loads that web page. According to research from Trend Micro’s TrendLabsSM: Hackers are […]

More attacks on high profile web sites. It is clear from this article that the attackers found the victim sites by scanning servers and pouncing on the found vulnerabilities. The compromised servers were then used to serve up malicious code to build a botnet. It is highly likely regular vulnerability analysis would have saved these […]

This article over at SecurityFocus has some eye opening comments from the authors of the Mpack exploitation kit. The increasing popularity of compromised websites being used as an exploitation platform against end users is becoming a worrying trend. There are a couple of tongue in cheek comments like these - Do you feel sorry for […]

There is some good information to be found at Stopbadware.org on securing a web site and ongoing efforts to eliminate the threat of malware being served up by compromised hosts and rogue web hosting companies. Basic security tips and tricks 5 steps to make your site more secure: Use strong passwords. Use SSH and SFTP […]

Interesting study by Google on the distribution of malware across different web servers. They took a sample of 70'000 sites so it is a good indication of what is being compromised to serve up malware to the public. The breakdown by server software is depicted below. It is important to note that while many servers […]

The first paragraph of this Network Computing Feature should be a wake up call for anyone on the internet who does not take security of their servers seriously. Following on from the first alarming paragraph is a lengthy 9 page feature on various vulnerability scanners. The article clearly demonstrates that while vulnerability assessment is not […]

On 18th of June a large scale attack was uncovered at an Italian based Web Hosting company. Websense reported that over 10'000 sites were compromised and used to serve malware to unsuspecting end users. SANS Internet Storm Center had some good analysis of the Mpack exploit package that was used with a follow up story […]