Hackers exploit Neosploit to booby trap BBC, US postal service

Cybercrooks have used the latest version of Neosploit to booby-trap an estimated 80,000 legitimate sites with malicious code. Victims of the attack include government, Fortune 500, and a weapons manufacturing firm, according to Ian Amit, director of security research at Aladdin Knowledge Systems. Amit said victims of the attack included the US Postal Service, which has since cleaned up its act.

Amit uncovered the assault while researching the newly-released Neosploit 3.1 hacker toolkit. During his research, he discovered login credentials for more than 200,000 servers on a server used by cybercrooks. These credentials included BBC login details fortunately unconnected to the corporation's news or content sites.

Analysis by Amit and his team at Aladdin suggest that at least three gangs were involved in collecting the list and that 80,000 of these sites had been loaded with malicious code by hackers as part of attempt to infect visiting surfers through drive-by download attacks. Organisations in 86 countries are said to be affected. Amit identified the affected orgainsations after examining server logs.