US Consulate site hacked

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 13 September 2007 07:39

Your IT - Home IT

According to Sophos, the web site of the US Consulate General in St Petersburg, Russia, has been used as part of an IFRAME exploit.

The exploit, which was subsequently cleaned from the Consulate General site, quietly linked to a pair of sites that exploit various browser vulnerabilities to install malware on visitors' systems.

"So, to answer the question of whether the US Consulate General site was specifically targeted in this attack - my answer is no, probably not. The prevalence of other much smaller sites compromised in exactly the same way (in just 7 days worth of data) suggests that the hackers just happened to have caught a big fish as they trawled for vulnerable servers,"wrote 'Fraser' (presumably SophosLabs UK's principal virus researcher Fraser Howard) in the company's blog.

"Thankfully, the US Consulate General site was cleaned up quickly, something which is sadly not the case for a lot of the smaller compromised sites we have seen," he added.