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Blackhole exploit posted on US Postal Service site

Return to sender of Spotify tainted ads pathogen

The US Postal Service has pulled down a site hosting malicious code that was earlier used in a sophisticated multi-stage attack featuring the Blackhole Exploit kit.

The infected site - http://ribbs.usps.gov - which is involved in the delivery of USPS's business mail-focused barcode-based Intelligent Mail services - was infiltrated with malicious JavaScript. This malicious script redirected through a relay of other sites to an attack portal.

The attack portal displays a sneaky 404 Page Not Found error message while actually delivering live malicious code.

The drive-by download attack was ultimately aimed at using software vulnerabilities to install Trojans onto the machines of surfers visiting the particular USPS domain the miscreants managed to compromise.

Last week the same Blackhole Exploit kit infested the website of Worldfest, a Houston, Texas music festival, cloud security firm zscalar reports. The same Blackhole Exploit kit starred in the tainted ad compromise that affected ad-supported versions of Spotify late last month.

Although that attack ultimately punted scareware software, the exploit kit allows those with very little or no coding ability to deliver a hostile payload of their choice.

Zscalar has a good dissection of the latest attack, detected on Thursday, in a blog post here. ®

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