On Wednesday, security researcher Randy Abrams visited the Equifax site to contest bad information in his credit report and was attacked by malicious software that tried to get him to download a fake Flash updater that was a vector for an obscure piece of malware called Adware.Eorezo.
Other users confirm that they were subjected to redirections to scam sites and malware when visiting Equifax's site. It's not clear how these were injected into the Equifax pages (they could be malicious advertising that snuck in under the radar of a programmatic ad broker, or the Equifax servers could be compromised, or something else). This kind of malware is typically served intermittently and as of now, no one can reproduce the events on Equifax's site, which could mean that Equifax purged the bad ads or malware, or it could just mean that the malware is lying low. Equifax has not made any public statements about this.
The site that previously gave up personal data for virtually every US person with a credit history was once again under the control of attackers, this time trying to trick Equifax visitors into installing crapware Symantec calls Adware.Eorezo. Knowing a thing or two about drive-by campaigns, Abrams figured the chances were slim he'd see the download on follow-on visits. To fly under the radar, attackers frequently serve the downloads to only a select number of visitors, and then only once.
Abrams tried anyway, and to his amazement, he encountered the bogus Flash download links on at least three subsequent visits. The picture above this post is the higher-resolution screenshot he captured during one visit. He also provided the video below. It shows an Equifax page redirecting the browser to at least four domains before finally opening the Flash download at the same centerbluray.info page.
Equifax website hacked again, this time to redirect to fake Flash update
[Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]
