TrendLabs continues battle against malware

TrendLabs continues battle against malware
Monday, July 09, 2007

On June 21, almost 6,000 Italian websites were infected by a massive online threat dubbed worldwide as the “ Italian Job,” which infected over 15,000 PC user who visited the compromised sites. Trend Micro’s global network of research, service and support and its headquarters in Manila, TrendLabs was among the first to discover the rapidly spreading infection and provided the solutions.

The infection began on June 15 and did not subside until 6 days after. This was the second time an attack happened, which exploited a number of legitimate Italian websites to spread malicious JavaScripts. This attack affected not only PC users based in Italy, but also the US, Spain and to a latter extent, some other parts of the world.

This massive infection used multiple components to surreptitiously infect a targeted group of Internet users. It is believed by security experts to have been an automated attack, created from a computer Trojan-making kit called Mpack.

The “Italian Job” represents a textbook example of today’s threat environment: Web-based, blended, sequential, targeted and profit-driven. This type of attack is not far from happening again, thus affecting even more Internet users. JavaScripts and other types of technologies that enable the goodness of Web 2.0 are highly susceptible to such attacks. Malware toolkits are available for sale on the online and frequently updated.

Web threats came as a natural outcome of the Web’s new interactivity. It is not only net users who are given more space online, but also threat authors. Indeed, the last two years has seen the rise of Web threats, surpassing worms and viruses, which used to be the most prominent of malware or malicious software.

“Web threats are threats that operate via the Internet; they arrive, propagate, deliver their payload, and entrench themselves via the Web. They are not merely threats originating from the Internet. More than just malicious files that arrive on computers, they perform a host of other actions once installed on machines. These actions then weave themselves in and out of the Web,” according to TrendLabs.

“What is especially notable is how such a large number of websites have been compromised in such a short period of time, possibly even in one go. It was an event arguably reminiscent of the outbreak era, wherein one malware is capable of spreading and infecting systems in a matter of minutes,” according to Paul Oliveria, senior technical writer at TrendLabs.

TrendLabs was among the first to provide appropriate solutions to counter this Italian attack. TrendLabs serves as the backbone of Trend Micro’s service infrastructure for providing continuous round-the-clock coverage utilizing more than 800 security experts to Trend Micro customers around the world.

-- Katrina C. Guevarra (TMTSJ)

Link
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/july/09/yehey/techtimes/20070709tech4.html