Brief

Olympics coverage targeted by hackers

Graham Cluley

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant reported that SophosLabs discovered that the Olympic Games area of NDTV.com was infected by a malicious SQL injection. “Visiting the site could infect your computer with malware. Obviously, news sites about the Olympics are particularly popular now. Interestingly, the content was supplied to NDTV by news agency AFP (Agence-France Presse), who syndicate their content to many different sites. We do not believe that AFP are responsible for this infection - it’s more likely that NDTV have not properly secured the computers running the AFP content,” commented Cluley.

Cluley went into detail on his blog where he wrote, “One of the products that AFP makes available to its customers is a ready-made “.net” micro-website offering background to events at the games, including flash animations and descriptions of the rules of different sports. This rich digital content is a boon to websites that want to have customers coming back to their website time and time again.”

He continued, “AFP supplies clients with ‘ready-to-publish’ digital content about the Olympic Games. In this instance it appears that Indian news website NDTV is syndicating AFP’s ready-made Olympic content, but has not properly secured their backend ASP/SQL infrastructure to avoid their sites being “peppered” with an infection.”

Cluley cautioned that, “It’s important to realize that AFP is not to blame - but if you are syndicating content around the web you might be wise to inform your customers and users of the importance of properly hardening their infrastructure to avoid bringing your company’s name into disrepute.”

Sophos had informed NDTV and AFP of the issue.