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- Researchers find more than 150,000 compromised websites
- The websites carried malware that overlaid them with malicious landing pages
- Web admins are advised to audit their code
Security researchers c/side recently reported on a major website hijacking campaign, in which unnamed threat actors took over 35,000 websites and used them to redirect visitors to malicious pages and even serve them malware.
Now, a month later, the team has claimed the campaign has scaled even further, and now compromises a staggering 150,000 websites.
C/side believes the campaign is related to the Megalayer exploit, since it’s known for distributing Chinese-language malware, contains the same domain patterns, and the same obfuscation tactics.
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Open redirects
While the method changed slightly, and now comes with a “slightly revamped interface”, the gist is still the same, as the attackers use iframe injections to display a full-screen overlay in the visitor’s browser.
The overlays show either impersonated legitimate betting websites, or outright fake gambling pages.
C/side did not detail who the attackers are, other than saying they could be linked to the Megalayer exploit.
The attackers are most likely Chinese, since they’re coming from regions where Mandarin is common, and since the final landing pages present gambling content under the Kaiyun brand.
They also did not discuss how the threat actors managed to compromise these tens of thousands of websites, but once the attackers gained access, they used it to inject a malicious script from a list of websites.
“Once the script loads, it fully hijacks the user’s browser window - often redirecting them to pages promoting a Chinese-language gambling (or casino) platform,” the researchers explained in the previous report.
To mitigate the risk of website takeover, c/side says web admins should audit their source code, block malicious domains, or use firewall rules for zuizhongjs[.]com, p11vt3[.]vip, and associated subdomains.
It would also be wise to keep an eye on logs for unexpected outgoing requests to these domains.
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