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China connection to Go Daddy WordPress attacks

Kevin Murphy, May 1, 2010, Domain Registrars

Go Daddy’s hosting customers are under attack again, and this time it looks like it’s more serious.
Reports are surfacing that WordPress sites hosted at Go Daddy, and possibly also Joomla and plain PHP pages there, are being hacked to add drive-by malware downloads to them.
Go Daddy has acknowledged the attacks, blaming outdated WordPress installations and weak FTP passwords, and has put up a page with instructions for cleaning the infection.
Last week, I was told that the first round of attacks was very limited. Today, the attackers seem to have stepped it up a notch.
As a result, Go Daddy could find itself in a similar situation to Network Solutions, which had a couple of thousand customer sites hacked a few weeks back.
The attacks appear to be linked to a well-known crime gang with a Chinese connection.
According to Sucuri, when a Go Daddy-hosted WordPress page is hacked, JavaScript is injected that attempts to redirect surfers to a drive-by attack from the domain kdjkfjskdfjlskdjf.com (don’t go there).
This domain was registered with BizCN.com, an ICANN-accredited Chinese registrar, but its name servers appear to have been created purely for the attack.
The registrant’s email address is hilarykneber@yahoo.com. This connects the attack to the “Kneber” botnet, a successful criminal enterprise that has been operating since at least December 2009.
A Netwitness study revealed the network comprised at least 74,000 hacked computers, and that the bulk of Kneber’s command and control infrastructure is based in China.
Since Kneber is known to be operated by a financially motivated gang, and it’s by no means certain that they’re Chinese, it’s probably inaccurate to suggest there’s something political going on.
However, I will note that Go Daddy was quite vocal about its withdrawal from the .cn Chinese domain name registration market.
Network Solutions, while it was quieter, also stopped selling .cn domains around the same time as the Chinese government started enforcing strict registrant ID rules last December.

Network Solutions under attack again

Kevin Murphy, April 18, 2010, Domain Registrars

Network Solutions’ hosting operation is under attack for the second time in a week, and this time it’s definitely not a WordPress problem.
The company has acknowledged that it has “received reports that Network Solutions customers are seeing malicious code added to their websites”, but has not yet released further details.
Sucuri.net, which was intimately involved in the news of the hack against NSI’s WordPress installations last week, blogged that this time the attacks appear to have compromised not only WordPress, but also Joomla-based and plain HTML sites.
Last week’s attacks were eventually blamed on insecure file permissions, which enabled shared-server hosting customers to look at each other’s WordPress database passwords.
But today NSI, one of the top-five domain name registrars, said: “It may not be accurate to categorize this as a single issue such as ‘file permissions’.”
Sucuri said that malicious JavaScript is being injected into the sites, creating an IFrame that sends visitors to drive-by download sites.
It’s a developing story, and not all the facts are out yet.
But it’s clear that NSI has a public relations problem on its hands. Some customers are already using Twitter to declare that they will switch hosts as a result.
And if it’s true, as Sucuri reports, that Google is already blocking some of the affected sites, who can blame them?