14 DAY TRIAL // The website of the Super Glue Corporation, maker of the original Super Glue adhesive product, was infected with malicious code that directed visitors to malware.
The infection was picked up by Avast! Antivirus installations and alerted the security vendor's researchers who set out to investigate.
"The infection was a Trojan JavaScript Redirector which takes visitors through a series of infected sites to the final location in Russia, most likely a distribution center for fake antivirus," they explain.
As usually, the scareware distribution attack took visitors through a series of redirects until landing them on the payload page.
AVAST virus analyst Alena Varkockova notes that this infection was likely part of a larger attack, as the JavaScript redirector spotted on the Super Glue site was also detected on 500 other websites.
It's not clear how the web pages were infected, but attackers are known to exploit vulnerabilities found by scanning websites en masse or to abuse stolen FTP credentials.
By the time AVAST's researchers had a chance to investigate the malicious page was already inactive, so they couldn't determine the exact nature of the payload.
Attacks like these can use either social engineering in the form of pages that claim people's computers are infected with malware and they need to download an antivirus product, or can take the form of drive-by downloads that exploit vulnerabilities in outdated software to install malware.
Drive-by download attacks are much more dangerous because they usually happen completely transparent to the victims. Users are advised to always keep their software and operating systems up to date, especially their browser plug-ins.
Running an up-to-date antivirus program that is capable of scanning web traffic is equally important given today's complex threat landscape.