14 DAY TRIAL // The United States has a Consulate General in Russia, in Saint Petersburg, of course - but you already knew that. What you didn't know is the fact that it has been the target of cyber-aggression. At the beginning of the week, its site has been attacked by hackers that inserted malicious code that was meant to download even more similar code.
"This latest attack highlights the fact that no organization is immune from infection, and that no matter what the size of the company, it must defend its webpages fully to avoid being stung," said Fraser Howard, principal virus researcher at SophosLabs.
But wait, this isn't just an isolated case - as Sophos claims, this is part of a huge campaign in which hackers have attacked vulnerable servers from all around the world, thus infecting more than 400 pages last week. As seen on the same site, most of these pages were hosted in Russia; you can get more info on that, by clicking here
And here you can see a copy of what the infected Consulate code looked like. The malware uploaded on the site had a script that exploited an Internet browser's vulnerabilities in order to install a Trojan virus. Of course, the infection would cause severe data leaks. And I have to say that this was a quite clever move the hackers made. They limited the target-public to those people who really are of interest. I mean, no regular Joe visits a Consulate web page. Then who does? Well, people that either want some info, or users that have some business or in any case, people that are important in some way. Now, that would make stolen data really valuable.
The site is now up and running without any infections, but keep in mind that things can be pretty bad if you get infected with a Trojan and your data gets phished.