Official Sony PlayStation site hacked as gamers get targeted by Trojans

Davey Winder
Thursday, 03 July 2008 19:59

Your IT - Entertainment

This week Sophos has been warning visitors to the Sony PlayStation website to watch out as they are at risk from a malware infection. It discovered that a number of pages at the official US PlayStation site have been compromised by hackers.

Specifically, Sophos warns, gamers need to be careful of the SingStar Pop and the God of War pages as the hackers have infected unauthorised code into these. The code takes the usual route of attempting to fool visitors into visiting a bogus site and, in this case, buying bogus software.

The SQL injection attack has placed a fake online anti-virus scanner on the Sony pages which reports numerous infections from a whole host of viruses and Trojans have been found on your PC. Particularly trusting, unsuspecting or easily scared users might be tempted to buy the solution being advertised.

The solution is, of course, itself bogus. These types of scams usually end up with software that, far from cleansing your PC, actually installs more malware. Often the end result is a zombified computer, part of a global botnet spreading spam, malware and malcontent.

Sophos warns, however, that it would be trivial for the hackers who have compromised the webpages to alter the payload so that it became more malicious, and installed code designed to harvest confidential information from users, or turn innocent victims' PCs into botnets which the cyber-criminals could use to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks and spread spam messages.

"There are millions of video game lovers around the world, many of whom will visit Sony's PlayStation website regularly to find out more about the latest console games.  Most would never expect that surfing to a website like this could potentially infect them with malware.  If users do not have sufficient protection in place then they might find that before they know it they have been scared into handing their credit card details over to a bunch of cyber-criminals," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.  "It is essential that all websites, especially high profile ones like this, have been properly hardened to prevent hackers from injecting malicious code on to what should be legitimate webpages."

Sony is not alone when it comes to be a target for the cyber-criminals, it seems that all players are now fair game. Read on to find out why...

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