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Hacker site claims breach of third security firm Web site in a week

HackersBlog breaches Web site of F-Secure in string of attacks on security firm sites.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
Elinor Mills
2 min read

A Romanian hacker site said on Wednesday it was able to breach the Web site of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure just as it had gained access to the sites of two other security companies earlier in the week.

F-Secure is "vulnerable to SQL Injection plus Cross Site Scripting," an entry on the HackersBlog site said. "Fortunately, F-Secure doesn't leak sensitive data, just some statistics regarding past virus activity."

An F-Secure spokesman said the company had taken the affected server down and that it was a low-level server that was not critical to the company and had no sensitive or customer data on it, just statistical data for marketing purposes.

"It is slightly embarrassing as a security company that we have had the breach," David Frazer, a spokesman in F-Secure's San Jose, California office, said in a phone interview. "We certainly, as a security company, want to ensure that all of our servers are patched to the levels that they should be."

HackersBlog publicized on its site that it had breached the U.S. Web site of Moscow-based firm Kaspersky on Saturday and the Portugal site of BitDefender on Monday using the same attack techniques.

Kaspersky said on Monday that no sensitive or customer data had been exposed in the breach and that it would ask a database expert to audit its systems. BitDefender said the site that had been breached belonged to an unnamed partner and no customer data was stolen.

SQL injection attacks, in which a small malicious script is inserted into a database that feeds information to the Web site, have become very popular exploit methods. Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, which allow for injection of malicious code in Web pages, also are common.

Updated 3:25 p.m. PST with F-Secure comment.