(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Microsoft reported on Monday that there has been a drastic rise in the number of Internet Explorer users attacked by malware that targets a vulnerability in the Internet browser, while revealing that the vulnerability now affects all supported editions of IE.
The use of malware installed on legitimate sites continues to be prevalent. Earlier this month, Russian malware distributors hacked the�CBS website and temporarily distributed malware to the site’s visitors.
The SANS Internet Storm Center reported that hackers are upgrading code on websites to infect unsuspecting IE visitors with data that can steal their critical information. According to researchers at Trend Micro, approximately 6,000 sites have already been infected with the exploit.
The method differs from previous attacks, where hackers typically distributed their malware on rogue websites.
The company wrote about the incident in its Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog: “Based on our stats, since the vulnerability has gone public, roughly 0.2 percent of users worldwide may have been exposed to Web sites containing exploits of this latest vulnerability. That percentage may seem low, however it still means that a significant number of users have been affected. The trend for now is going upwards: we saw an increase of over 50 percent in the number of reports today compared to yesterday.”
According to the MMPC blog, the compromised sites range from a popular search engine in Taiwan, which is now said to be clean, to many pornography sites.
In Microsoft’s revised security advisory, the company said that the vulnerability is found in all IE versions in use, from IE5 through to IE8 Beta 2.
Microsoft has not yet issued a patch for the exploit, but has offered many recommendations to reduce the chances of users’ computers being compromised.
However, Brian Krebs, the author of Security Fix blog, says that many of these so-called recommendations did not work when he tested them out on a Windows Vista plaform, while others needed to be tweaked in order to work.
For this reason, he advises Windows users to consider using any Internet browser “other than Internet Explorer, at least until Microsoft issues a patch to fix this vulnerability.”
He also points out that anti-virus programs have turned up less-than-remarkable results for the exploit, with VirusTotal.com reporting that only four out of the 32 of these anti-virus programs flagged the exploit as malicious or suspicious.
