Part of security software vendor CA's Web site was cracked earlier this week and was redirecting visitors to a malicious Web site hosted in China.
Although the problem now appears to have been corrected, cached versions of some pages in the press section of CA.com show that earlier this week the site had been redirecting visitors to the uc8010.com domain, which has been serving malicious software since late December, according to Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center.
The hack is similar to last year's attack on the Dolphin Stadium Web site, which infected visitors looking for information on the Super Bowl football game, Sachs said. "It's exactly the same setup," he said. "It's JavaScript that they've managed to insert into the title or the body of the HTML."
CA itself may not even host the press release section of its site, as that job is often outsourced to a third party, Sachs said. Often a misconfigured application server or a Web or database programming error can give hackers all the opening they need to insert their malicious code.
"When you outsource, you've got to be just as (demanding) about security as you are with your own site," Sachs said.
CA representatives could not be reached immediately for comment.
The uc8010.com domain serves attack code that exploits a recently patched vulnerability in the RealPlayer multimedia software, Sachs said.
The criminals behind this domain have hacked tens of thousands of Web pages and inserted code that redirects visitors to the malicious server, he added.
SANS has posted a note on the uc8010.com issue and recommends that IT staff block access to the domain. Sachs said another domain, ucmal.com -- also hosted in China -- should also be blocked because it is associated with a similar type of attack.