Hacked Antivirus Site Serves Up - a Virus

Remember StopBadware.org and its labeling of RealPlayer as badware? Now it's "picking on" the website of an antivirus (AV) vendor, and rightfully so: it's been hacked and is serving up viruses.

Don't worry, it's not a major player in AV sector: it's a small firm based in India. The company, AVSoft Technologies, sells the SmartCOP AV software, and its the download page on its site that has been hacked.

It's not a new technique nor a new virus. They are using an iFrame hack. The attackers open an invisible iFrame window in the browser which redirects the client to another server, which then attempts to install malware on the computer.

The virus in question is the Virut virus. It's nothing new, so a PC with up-to-date AV software (though probably not AVSoft Technologies') should be fine.

Besides the obvious good news that this isn't someone large like McAfee or Symantec, there's more good news in that the partnership between Google and StopBadware.org is still working fine: if you search for AV Technologies in Google you get the warning above.

Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! provides the same "service." Yet another reason to search via Google?