Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Scary World Ahead?!

No, I appreciate a good piece of FUD, but one of my 2008 predictions is coming to life with scary, scary speed!

I predicted that "Loss of trust towards legitimate Internet sites = yes. This is manifested by things like this point by the WS guys - more 0wned than malicious sites are used to spread malware. Even now I shudder from the thought that ANY site I visit might be displaying a malicious banner [or serving malware thru other means] ad which is either bought or "hacked in" by the attackers. The implications of this are pretty horrifying!" and it does worry me, but I am not yet truly paranoid about this.

OK, change that "am" to "was." Today I officially became Internet-phobic (where do I sign up? :-)) when I've heard (through a little birdie, as usual) that one of the security publication websites was 0wned (maybe thu banners? the details are not available yet) and serving malware. Nice! In a few minutes, I was also informed that one of the leading business publications is also serving malware. Fuck!

Yes, my personal system probably won't be 0wned by this, but many will be (IE users are clearly screwed, but I doubt that Firefox users or Mac fans will be immune either).

So, welcome to 0wned Internet 2.0, where every site is 0wned and is serving malware?

Bonus question: do you think major brand AV will protect you from the above?

UPDATE: a similar post from Andy, IT Guy called "Will Malware Kill the Internet?" is here. And another update on that from him (even more insightful)

UPDATE2: another fun one "Trend Micro Hacked - Serving Malicious Iframes"

Dr Anton Chuvakin