Thousands of websites have now been hijacked by this devious, and growing, malicious scheme

Date:
Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:02:00 +0000

Description:
Scheme grew from 35,000 websites to 150,000 websites in just a matter of
weeks.

FULL STORY

Security researchers c/side recently reported on a major website hijacking campaign, in which unnamed threat actors took over 35,000 websites and used them to redirect visitors to malicious pages and even serve them malware.

Now, a month later, the team has claimed the campaign has scaled even
further, and now compromises a staggering 150,000 websites.

C/side believes the campaign is related to the Megalayer exploit, since its known for distributing Chinese-language malware , contains the same domain patterns, and the same obfuscation tactics.

Open redirects

While the method changed slightly, and now comes with a slightly revamped interface, the gist is still the same, as the attackers use iframe injections to display a full-screen overlay in the visitors browser.

The overlays show either impersonated legitimate betting websites, or
outright fake gambling pages.

C/side did not detail who the attackers are, other than saying they could be linked to the Megalayer exploit.

The attackers are most likely Chinese, since theyre coming from regions where Mandarin is common, and since the final landing pages present gambling
content under the Kaiyun brand.

They also did not discuss how the threat actors managed to compromise these tens of thousands of websites, but once the attackers gained access, they
used it to inject a malicious script from a list of websites.

Once the script loads, it fully hijacks the users browser window - often redirecting them to pages promoting a Chinese-language gambling (or casino) platform, the researchers explained in the previous report.

To mitigate the risk of website takeover, c/side says web admins should audit their source code, block malicious domains, or use firewall rules for zuizhongjs[.]com, p11vt3[.]vip, and associated subdomains.

It would also be wise to keep an eye on logs for unexpected outgoing requests to these domains.

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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/thousands-of-websites-have-now-been-hij acked-by-this-malicious-scheme

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