Information Technology Security

By Bill Toulas, Bleeping Computer Security researchers have revealed that hackers can hijack your online accounts before you even register them by exploiting flaws that have been already been fixed on popular websites, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Zoom, WordPress, and Dropbox. Andrew Paverd, a researcher at Microsoft Security Response Center, and Avinash Sudhodanan, an independent security researcher, analyzed 75 popular online services and found that at least 35 are vulnerable to account pre-hijacking attacks. These attacks vary in type and severity, but they all stem from poor security practices on the side of the websites themselves. As some vulnerable websites run bug bounty programs, it is surprising and worrying to see that such elementary attacks are still possible against their users.

By Bill Toulas, Bleeping Computer Ukraine's computer emergency response team (CERT-UA) has published an announcement warning of ongoing DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks targeting pro-Ukraine sites and the government web portal. The threat actors, who at this time remain unknown, are compromising WordPress sites and injecting malicious JavaScript code to perform the attacks. These scripts are placed in the HTML structure of the main files of the website and are base64-encoded to evade detection. The code runs on the website visitor's computer and directs their available computational resources to generate an abnormal number of requests to attack objects (URLs) defined in the code. The result is that some of the target websites are overwhelmed by the requests and, as a result, rendered inaccessible to their regular visitors. This all happens without the owners or the visitors of the compromised sites ever realizing it, except for maybe some barely noticeable performan...