We recently found an interesting phishing kit on a compromised website that has QR code capabilities, along with the ability to control the phishing page in real time. What our investigation revealed was that attackers were leveraging PIX, a new payment method created by the Brazilian Central Bank. Features & Context for PIX PIX was More Info »
Tag Archives: Redirects
SEO Spam Links in Nulled Plugins
It’s not unusual to see website owners running things on a budget. Choosing a safe and reliable hosting company, buying a nice domain name, boosting posts on social media, and ranking on search engines — all this costs a lot of money. At the end of the day, some site owners may even choose to More Info »
The Dangers of Using Abandoned Plugins & Themes
It’s not very often that we see abandoned components being used on a website — but when we do, it’s most often because the website was exhibiting malware-like behavior and we were called to investigate and clean up the site. Old and abandoned plugins and themes are a good target for opportunistic attackers who are More Info »
Why You Should Monitor Your Website
In an effort to maintain unauthorized access or profit off a website’s environment long after an initial compromise, attackers commonly leverage a variety of different techniques and tactics. These techniques range from adding backdoors, stealing sensitive data, redirecting the site to other third-party resources, or even injecting specially crafted links to give their own sites More Info »
Evasive Maneuvers in Data Stealing Gateways
We have already shared examples of many kinds of malware that rely on an external gateway to receive or return data, such as different malware payloads. During a recent investigation, we came across this example of a PHP script that attackers use for many different purposes. What makes the sample interesting is that alongside this More Info »
Redirects to YouTube Defacement Channel
During a recent investigation, we found an infected website was redirecting to YouTube after its main index.php file had been modified to include the following line of HTML: This technique works because it’s possible to use HTML within .php files — as long as the HTML is outside the PHP code tags. In this case, More Info »
SiteCheck Malware Report: September Summary
Our free SiteCheck tool helps website owners remotely scan their website to detect malware infections, blacklisting status, website errors, and other anomalies. Scanning a website’s external HTML source code provides immediate results, without the need to install any software or applications to identify threats. In September alone, a total of 17,138,086 website scans were performed More Info »
Malicious Pop-up Redirects Baidu Traffic
Malicious pop-ups and redirects have become two extremely common techniques used by attackers to drive traffic wherever they want. During a recent investigation, we came across an obfuscated pop-up script leveraging baidu[.]com search results to redirect users to the attacker’s own domain. Below is the encoded JavaScript: Once decoded, the behavior becomes a bit more More Info »
Web Crawler & User Agent Blocking Techniques
This is a simple script that allows hackers to block specific crawlers based upon website requests from specific user-agents. This is useful when you don’t want certain traffic from being able to load certain content – usually a phishing page or a malicious download. if(preg_match(‘/bot|crawler|spider|facebook|alexa|twitter|curl/i’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’])) { logger(“[BOT] {$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]} – 500”); header(‘HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server More Info »
Spox Phishing Kit Harvests Chase Bank Credentials
Phishing kits are the back end components to a phishing attack and are often designed to make it easier to deploy a phishing page. These kits are typically bundled in compressed files, such as .zip archives, and contain the entire file infrastructure needed to operate a phishing page. Once a kit is uploaded to a More Info »