On the first of August the Xavier Media blog mention a hack of a Swedish online bookstore that caused the web site to distribute malware.

Since most of us are extremly dependent on our web sites it’s important to check out your own web site to make sure it’s not scarying your visitors away. This is when the tips mentioned in Keep an eye on your site comes in handy for any web site or blog owner:

1. Make sure you always update your blog software and other scripts you got on your site to the latest version when a new security fix is released.
2. Secure your own PHP code so you’re not going to end up as a victim for SQL injections.
3. Test your site at Google’s Safebrowsing site to see if they’ve found something suspicious: http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-EN&site=http://www.sampleaddress.com/
   Replace www.sampleaddress.com with your own site.
4. Check your site at for example McAfees SiteAdvisor.com every now and then

You should also check your static HTML pages (or any other page including HTML code) for javascript codes you haven’t added yourself because today I found this piece of code in one of my customers pages:

<!– o –><script language=’JavaScript’>
Some weird characters here
</script><!– c –>

Popularity: 7% [?]

According to Trend Micro you should stay away from files called start.html, begin.html, r.html, main.html, news.html, and about.html since all these files will try to install a dangerious file called WATCH.EXE. This .EXE file contains a malware called TROJ_AGENT.AYZO.

Since all these .html and .exe files are hosted on legitimate sites that has been hacked or compromised it’s important to have a look at your address bar every now and then. It’s of course also important to not to download files you don’t know are safe!

If you own a web site on your own you have to upgrade all your blogging, forum and other software you may use on your site as soon as a new security update is released. You should also look for files you know you haven’t uploaded (espesially files called start.html, begin.html, r.html, main.html, news.html, and about.html).

If you host your web site on a unix or linux based server then it’s really easy to search for the *.html files. Just logon to your server via SSH and type find . -name “r.html” -print. This will search for all files called r.html in the current directory and in all subdirectories. If you got a large web site it may take some time

Popularity: 7% [?]

Trend Micro is writing about spam with random subjects not relevant to the actual content in the email. The content in the spam emails in this case are usually on line of text and a link that ends with r.html. The dangerous part of all these kinds of spam is that if you click on the link a file called video.exe will try to install on you computer. The file is actually a malware that will send spam via your computer.

The subjects you should look out for are:

• Hiliary admits past failures
• Star Trek star dies at age 79
• Find out about Harry Potter’s last novel
• Turner Empire poised for bankruptcy file
• Obama suffers setback in polls due to sex secrets
• Nokia unveils revolutionary new phone design
• Ford unveils latest 2 door design hatch
• Italy knocked out of Euro 2008
• Britney found hanged in locker room

Trend Micro writes:

The spam-malware tandem is a common tactic, and most spam does lead to malware.

So the advice here is to look out for spam and never click on links in spam!!!!

Read more at TrendLabs.

Popularity: 7% [?]