Windows Live – HACKED!
March 8th, 2007
The above picture was provided by Symantec. It shows, Microsoft’s search engine being hijacked by a group of hackers. In excess of 95% of the results returned to queries entered in Windows Live search were directing users to malware-hosting websites or exploiting web pages. Fortunately, only the Italian version of the search engine got hijacked, according to SunBelt.
Furthermore, here’s Elia Florio’s – one of Symantec’s Security Response Engineers – official response for the issue:
“At the moment, the problem is that when someone searches a combination of specific Italian keywords on the Windows Live portal, that person will always get a set of weird links in the search results. These weird links will most likely be related to the Linkoptimizer gang (aka Gromozon)—so this likely means that the Gromozon gang has managed to take over and manipulate the search results of Windows Live by getting their links to end up on the top of the search result lists. Symantec has verified the initial claims of SunBelt and has indeed verified that the Italian Windows Live Search gives a new meaning to the phrase “everything you need, all in one place.”. What is the master plan of the Gromozon gang? Well, we don’t know yet, but we are expecting something even more sinister to appear sooner or later. At the moment we know that the encrypted Javascript embedded in those weird pages is redirecting users to the domains hxxp://www.itzzot.cc and hxxp://e1.extreme-dm.com”.
By this time, Microsoft did not provide any official answer on the issue yet. However, this is still under monitoring.
Featured Tags hack, live, symantec, windos
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Comments
A Windows product was hacked? Say it isn’t so! :)
I corrected the title :) I meant Microsoft not Windows, but hey, it became a habit.
It´s called Windows Live actually, as you can see on the site´s logo. :)
I’ll just call it Microsoft’s search engine :)
Call it what you want, I’ll just use google :)
Better yet. Google it with Windows Live! :)