Telegraph website targeted in mystery attack by hackers

This is the reason why I love this area of law!

The Internet is growing rapidly and with that comes the need for laws to regulate its use and to adjudicate the wrongs.

Yesterday I commented on a story about a "DOS" attack which brought Estonia to its knees. Today there was another report, this time in the Times (the UK newspaper), about another UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph’s website becoming a victim of a DOS attack.

A "denial of service" attacks occurs when hundreds of thousands of computers are directed to log onto a particular site simultaneously, causing it to crash under the weight of requests. The owners of these computers are unusually unuaware they are participating in the attack – their machines having been co-opted by an e-mail or internet-based worm sent via a network known as a 'botnet'.

Last year a Department of Trade and Industry report found that more than 50 per cent of businesses had suffered "a premeditated and malicious" security incident in the past twelve months. For large businesses, the average cost of the worst such incident was as much as £130,000, the report said.

So as I mentioned yesterday, having laws and even severe penalties is certainly not going to solve the problem.

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One in ten websites are infected with Malware

The Times reported that about one in ten websites are infected with malicious software (commonly known as Malware), such as ‘keyloggers’ which captures every keystroke a user makes.

Research by Google culminating in a report entitled ‘The Ghost in the Browser’ analysed approximately 4.5 million websites over a 12 month period and discovered that 450,000 had caused a test computer to make a ‘drive-by download’.

Sensitive data such as banking passwords and e-mail addresses could unwittingly be handed over to criminals as a result of visiting infected pages, which work by exploiting a vulnerability in the user’s internet browser, a study by the search company suggests.

It is unfortunately that the average computer user has no real means to protect himself from these kinds of threats. Their browser, and their personal information along with it, can be compromised just by visiting a page and become the vehicle for installing multitudes of Malware on their systems.

The most troubling finding is that 70 per cent of web-based infections were found on ‘legitimate’ websites. These Malware are embedded or linked to these websites often without the knowledge of the website owners.

Websites with advertising were among those most commonly exploited because the ads are often displayed via a third party network and therefore not under the control of the website owner. Other sites that were vulnerable included those with user-generated content, such as forums, blogs and those that make use of ‘widgets’ (e.g. traffic counters) which could be configured to exploit a visitor’s computer.

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