Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes)
More than 115,000 websites—many run by major universities, government organizations, and media companies—remained wide open to hacker takeovers because they hadn’t installed critical patches released 10 weeks ago, security researcher Troy Mursch said Monday. A separate researcher reported on Tuesday that many of the sites were already compromised and were being used to surreptitiously mine cryptocurrencies or push malware on unsuspecting visitors.
Infected pages included those belonging to the University of Southern California, Computer World’s Brazil site, and the Arkansas Judiciary’s Courts and Community Initiative, which were causing visitors’ computers to run resource-intensive code that mines cryptocurrency, Jérôme Segura, lead malware intelligence analyst at antivirus provider Malwarebytes, told Ars.
Segura said a Harvard University page that earlier was also infected with mining malware had since been defaced, presumably by a different party. Meanwhile, a Western Michigan University page that earlier was infected with code that pushed a malicious browser extension was later repaired. Segura reported his findings Tuesday and has indexed more than 900 infected sites here.
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