MySpace hacking gets worse – Alicia Keys profile amongst infected

MySpace has always had a problem of people’s individual accounts being hacked, but the problem took a turn for the worse this week as several musicians profiles were taken over and used to launch malware on to their fans computers.

The biggest star to have their homepage hit was R’n'B singer Alicia Keys, along with French funk band ‘Greements of Fortune’ and Scottish rock band the ‘Dykeenies’. The hackers had inserted trojan horses in to the pages disguised as new video codecs. When anyone visited the hacked page, malicious software attempts to install itself on the visitors computer.

If that failed, the visitor was asked to install a new codec to view a video on the page, which actually changed the computer’s DNS settings to redirect future searches to unauthorized sites. This would then allow the hackers to take over what users see on their browsers and what they download onto their computers.

Clicking on almost anything on the hacked pages directed visitors to co8vd.cn/s, which is a Chinese malware site. Whether this exploit attempt is linked to the recent move of RBN (Russian Business Network) from Russia to a new Chinese base is unknown but a distinct possibility.

Alicia Keys page, and the pages of all the known hack attempts on the well known artists have been purged of the problem, but the exploit could have been active for up to five days before being discovered, meaning there could be a great many people infected already.

Smaller bands meanwhile have been left to fend for themselves, and many have had to start their MySpace profiles again from scratch because of the problem.

What’s worrying is Roger Thompson, chief technology officer of LinkScanner, whose software discovered the problem, thinks MySpace itself was attacked, rather than just individual pages. So none of the simple username/password hacking here, this is much more serious.

A MySpace spokesperson spoke to MTV about their attempts to prevent attacks:

“Individuals who try to phish our members are violating the law and are not welcome on MySpace. We have blocked and removed the source of this phishing attempt and restored the profile.”

This is a massive problem, and still ongoing. My advice would be not to visit any MySpace page without first making sure your computer is fully protected against viruses and malware attacks.

• 

• US Treasury websites hacked to serve malware
• MySpace on Facebook as networks get more social
• Wikipedia beats MySpace – For music fans seeking artist information
• MySpace karaoke, the new feature from hell
• Google study finds 10% of web pages contain malicious code