Hijacked Bank of India website downloads malware

The website of one of the leading Indian financial services companies is back online after U.S. researchers discovered it was downloading a wide range of malware to customer PCs.

Sunbelt Software discovered Thursday afternoon that the Bank of India's website had been compromised and was distributing about 30 types of malware, Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt CEO, told SCMagazine.com. Sunbelt learned that the site had become compromised while researching another malware issue. The company contacted the Bank of India, which shut the site down about 2 a.m. EST Friday to clean the server, he said. The site is up and running again."We tracked communication with [the other malware] to the Bank of India site," Eckelberry said. "We're fairly certain this was done by the Russian Business Network (RBN), an underground criminal gang in Russia responsible for lot of bad things on the internet."The exploit appeared to be a malicious IFRAME, which took advantage of a Microsoft Windows 2003 server running the Bank of India site, he added. The IFRAME downloaded a wide variety of malware to PCs that have not been patched since August 2006, Eckelberry said.Among the distributed malware were variants of TSPY_AGENT.AAVG and Trojan.Netview, several rootkits and a Trojan.Pandex. The former steals information from active windows on vulnerable end-user PCs, as well as information collected by a keylogger, network configuration and user names and passwords from POP3 and SMTP email protocols.The collected files were uploaded to an FTP server in Russia, according to Sunbelt."Bank of India had a hole in its systems, and the Russians took the opportunity to insert code into the page," Eckelberry said. "The same thing happened to the Super Bowl site earlier this year."