Malicious hackers have managed to infect about 57,000 web pages with a potent exploit cocktail that targets a variety of vulnerable applications to surreptitiously install malware on visitor machines.

The exploits install an assortment of nasty software, including Gologger, a keystroke logging trojan, and a backdoor that attempts to connect to a website hosted in China, according to Mary Landesman, a researcher at ScanSafe, a company that protects end users from malicious websites.

The attackers were able to plant a malicious iframe in the pages by exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities. Once in place, the script silently pulls down javascript from a0v.org that silently runs while people are visiting one of the infected websites. Affected sites included health care organizations such as the New York Methodist Hospital, charitable and nursing facilities such as (obfuscated).com, (obfuscated).com, (obfuscated).org, and (obfuscated).com, and others, according to web searches here and here. (Don't click on any of the search results unless you know what you're doing.)

The vast majority of search results returned by Google and Yahoo failed to detect the threat despite the use of technology on both sites that's supposed to prevent users from clicking on malicious links.

For purpose of this report I have obfuscated some site links included in the original article.

Reported at The Register
[theregister.co.uk...]