You Can Get a Virus from an AIDS Site

The United Nations' HIV/AIDS portal for Asia Pacific has been hacked and infected, as has been discovered by Websense Security Labs. This is just low! It's one thing to hack eBay, or Amazon or AOL and other sites like that, but to go and infect such a website that has been created to help people with AIDS (a.k.a. dying people) is rotten and I hope the guys that did it get busted and receive heavy sentences!

As I've read on Websense's page, what the hackers did was to exploit multiple vulnerabilities that the page had and then compromised it with malicious code. So, what happens? Well, when you visit the site it automatically executes malicious JavaScript. Some browsers may have plugins that prevent this script from being executed, but others don't. In any case, if your computer is vulnerable and you enter the site, you won't have a very nice surprise. If you are infected with the malicious code you will get a trojan virus downloaded as a nice prize! Also, a "backdoor" will be installed on your machine - isn't that just great?

So to say it briefly - you visit the site, and if you are unprotected you get a trojan and a backdoor. For those less tech-savvy of you, I'm going to explain in a nutshell what these are. A trojan is a type of malware that hackers may use to locate passwords, steal some data or just make the system more vulnerable. As for the backdoor, well…it's a sort of method used to bypass normal authentication or secure remote access to a computer without getting detected. I'm sure that you can see how those two will work together.

My advice is to keep a good (and up-to-date) anti-virus as well as an active firewall on your machine, because you may never know what site has been infected!