March 13, 2008 (Computerworld) Antivirus vendor Trend Micro Inc. confirmed Thursday that "some portions" of its site had been hacked earlier this week, but hedged when asked if those pages had been serving up attack code to unsuspecting visitors.
"I can't confirm or deny the details," said Mike Sweeny, a spokesman for the Tokyo-based security company, on Thursday afternoon. "Some pages were compromised, but we took those pages down and took corrective action hours ago." When pressed for more information, Sweeny would only say the attack was "under analysis."
The English-language edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers, said Trend Micro's site was hacked around 9:00 p.m. Sunday, Tokyo time (7:00 p.m. Eastern, on Saturday, in the U.S.).
"When users viewed any of the modified pages, they were reconnected to other sites without realizing it, and a type of virus was installed on their computer that causes them to download other viruses in a series," said the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Other reports speculated that the Trend Micro hack was part of the larger campaign that has infected some 20,000 pages in the past few days. According to researchers at McAfee Inc., those hacks are script-injection attacks that reference JavaScript attack code which in turn -- and only after several cascading pages -- leads to an executable piece of malware. McAfee's experts compared the still-ongoing script-based attacks as similar to those that compromised the Web sites of both the Miami Dolphins NFL team and its Dolphin Stadium days before the 2007 Super Bowl.
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