Korean Artillery Fire Exchange Exploited to Distribute Scareware

[tipo]

Scareware pushers have poisoned search results related to the North and South Korean cross-border clash at Yeonpyeong with malicious links.

Earlier today, North Korea fired artillery shells that hit the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong. The South returned fire with K-9 howitzers.

After exchanging two rounds of shells in the course of an hour, the confrontation stopped. The North's provocation was afterwards condemned by the governments of many countries.

As with most important events, a lot of people went online to search for additional information, causing keywords related to the clash to become hot search topics.

Security vendor Trend Micro warns that scareware pushers immediately took notice of this and altered their black hat search engine optimization (BHSEO) campaigns to target the keywords.

This method involves artificially pushing rogue websites at the top of search results for particular topics. "Within hours of the incident, certain Korea-related search terms were already poisoned," the Trend Micro researchers write.

The Tech Herald reports that some of the actively target searches include "north korea bombs south korea", "north korea attacks south korea", "kim jongh il", "korean war", "world war 3", "yeonpyeong island", "korean news."

Users who click on the malicious links are redirected to websites distributing fake antivirus software, commonly referred to as scareware or roguware.

This scheme is browser-aware. Internet Explorer users will see a page asking them to install a Flash Player ActiveX control, while Firefox users will be shown a fake "What's new" offering a Flash Player update.

In both cases, the file served for download is a fake antivirus program, who's goal is to scare users into buying a license to clean inexistent infections from their computers.

Today's artillery fire exchange between the North and South is probably the worst cross-border clash since the Korean War Armistice was signed in 1953.

During the incident, two South Korean marines lost their lives and six were seriously wounded. Three civilians also suffered injuries.

The casualties for North Korea remain unknown and the country's government claims that it acted in response to artillery shells being fired into its maritime territory near Yeonpyeong.

South Korean military officials admitted to conducting regular artillery training exercises in the area, but said that they never fired in North Korea's direction.

link