Being cautious on the web…
Incidents.org is reporting on the defacement of a security related web site (winsnort.com). They say they usually decline to comment on those because the attention is what the defacers thrive on. However, it does pay to keep your browser updated and antivirus current. What’s more…. Several days ago there was the news that the President of Iran now has a blog (which is ironic in many ways given the restrictions they place on internet use….) But… anyway, I figured he is getting his propaganda tool our and ready in advance of the UN showdown over the nuclear program. Well, it turns out that some have noticed an interesting gift from the visit to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s site….
According to the post, if visiting the site from Israel and attempting to click on a link she received a Norton Antivirus warning about an IE exploit attempt. From the screenshots the ip was 62.220.121.131 and the exploit was tagged as “HTTP MS IE File DragDrop Embed Code” attack. It did check out to be an Iranian IP address according to her research and the link she describes as being from the www.ahmadinejad.ir to www.khamenei.ir
I can’t seem to confirm any exploit here in the US, however I just may not be lucky. Can anyone outside of Israel corroborate this? Or is this just targetted at Israeli IP’s? Or, is there another explanation? Be cautious out there.
Edit— BTW, the IP address above seems to be the www.khamenei.ir site which is “Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei official website – I.R.R.C.I”. This is one of the links from the site of Ahmadinejad.
Patches for this vulnerability have been out for some time…. MS045-038 is supposed to address the problem.
–UPDATE 8/15/06–
Some are suggesting that the activity seen was a false positive. Some information on that here. Also there is news that Israeli hackers shut down the site for a time (DoS I suppose).