Tactics of WordPress attackers similar to bank assaults

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.csoonline.com/article/731797/tactics-of-wordpress-attackers-similar-to-bank-assaults

By Antone Gonsalves
CSO
April 16, 2013

Cybercriminals are attacking servers hosting WordPress sites in an attempt to 
build a potent botnet that would be eerily similar to one used last year to 
attack major U.S. financial institutions.

The motives of the latest attackers is not known. However, their tactics 
resemble those used to build the infamous Brobot botnet, in which the attackers 
compromised PHP-based websites powered by the Joomla and WordPress content 
management systems. It was used to attack financial institutions including as 
U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, PNC Financial Services 
Group and SunTrust Banks.

The similarities have some security experts worried. "I don't think we can know 
exactly what the motivations for the attacks are right now, but the concern is 
this attack could be building something very similar and its scale is pretty 
significant," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive of 
CloudFlare.

In both attacks, the criminals used a botnet comprised of home personal 
computers to attack hosting servers in order to build a far more powerful 
network. In the latest assaults, the hackers are using a so-called 
"brute-force" attack, which involves trying many combinations of commonly used 
user names and passwords.

[...]


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