Hackers Breach UK Communist Site

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» 08 June 2009

Just recently, the website for the Communist Party of Britain was attacked and infected with malware. As of this writing, everything's already back to normal and the malicious code has since been cleaned out. At the time the attack happened, Sophos specialists immediately warned Internet users to stay as far away as virtually possible from any and all pages related to the abovementioned site because these could infect their systems and let hackers freely access their PCs as well.

The cyber attackers have changed a Microsoft Silverlight script on the communist party site so that it would activate a harmful JavaScript code recognized by the Internet security firm as Mal/iFrame-F. Coincidentally, the local and European election in the United Kingdom was currently happening when the iFrame-F script was uploaded into the minority party's website. As such, this event was intentionally staged during a time when the site would receive far more visitors than usual.

According to a report issued by the Sophos security company, the exploited file on the web page is lined with code dishing out the Microsoft Silverlight script, which implies that a crucial portion of the site's multimedia system was compromised by the vulnerability exploit. The malicious code, which is placed in a file named silverlight.js, doles out an iFrame that redirects to a similarly malicious Google-imitating website based in China.

Graham Cluley, Sophos's senior technology consultant, discloses that the infection that the British Communist Party website has is "invisible to the naked eye" but is actually submerged deep inside the source code of a plug-in for one of the site's pages. The code was seemingly made to provide interesting video effects and animation to website visitors, but is instead engineered to covertly inject malicious code from Internet servers found in Russia and China.

Cluley concludes that Internet surfers everywhere need to understand that it's not only gambling or adult content websites that are full of malicious code or used as bait by hackers to trick users into downloading system-crippling malware. At this day and age, any unsafe or vulnerable website can be victimized by hackers and then used to victimize other network or computer systems.

Sophos had already informed the Communist Party of Britain about its site's troubles by both phone and e-mail, and several other media outlets relayed the warning as well. As of last weekend, a party spokesperson has confirmed that there really was an infection but it has already been cleaned out.

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