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Barack Obama’s election as the 44th president of the United States has spawned a new malware attack.  Scammers wasted no time sending out e-mails with links to a video of the victory speech he gave the night of the election.  The link takes the user to a site called America.gov, and like many malicious spams before it, produces a pop up claiming Adobe Flash must be updated in order for the video to run.  The download is, of course, malware which steals personal info and sends it to a host machine run by the scammers.

Another version of the attack claims to come from a Spanish news site and has a video actually embedded in the e-mail.  Clicking on it prompts a download called “BarackObama.exe” and if run it sets up a direct link between the PC and the scammers.  Experts are particularly worried about this variation as it is not detected by anti-virus software.

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BusinessWeek’s website has fallen under attack by hackers. Security vendor Sophos discovered the attack last week. Hundreds of pages of the popular site have been infected with malicious Javascript that redirects users to a Russian website that attempts to download malware to their computers. While some of the download attempts are being detected by malware blockers, many more are slipping through easily. The stats compiled by Google’s Safe Browsing API are alarming:

Of the 2157 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 214 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 09/15/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 09/11/2008. Malicious software includes 721 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s), 3 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new processes on the target machine.

Hijacking legit sites for malware attacks is nothing new. In the past USA Today, Facebook, MySpace, and others have been used by hackers for malware delivery. Experts estimate that at least 70% of all web based malware is hosted on legit sites. It is not yet known how many BusinessWeek.com visitors were caught in the attack and infected, and the site has had no comment.

Keep reading for safety tips on how you can avoid malware.

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Sections: Computers, Security, Web, Websites

Facebook recently came under attack by hackers who are posting malicious links on the Wall section of user profiles. The links urge the user to click on them to view a video hosted by Google, but in reality the link takes them to a compromised page with another link that claims to be an update for Adobe Flash. If clicked it downloads a Trojan called Troj/Dloadr-BPL. Once installed it downloads additional malware onto the infected computer.

The malicious message is made to look like it came from one of the members on the user’s list of friends. It’s likely that many people have already fallen for the hacker’s fake link and had their Facebook account hijacked as a result. This isn’t the first time hackers have targeted a social networking site. MySpace has been targeted more than a few times already, and the pages of several celebrities have been compromised. It appears that Web 2.0 is overshadowing email as a favorite target for hackers and spammers. If you find a link to a video posted on your Wall from a friend, be very suspicious and thin twice before clicking on it!

Read [PC World]

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Sections: Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Websites