Hackers strike defense companies through real-time ad bidding

Invincea has detected such harmful landing pages on websites such as the fantasy football site fleaflicker.com, earthlink.com and the conservative commentary site theblaze.com. The landing pages are up for as short as 10 minutes to four hours.

"Those landing pages are stood up and torn down so quickly that nobody in the security industry are able to detect the malicious URL and put it on a blacklist fast enough," Belcher said. "By the time it is, the page is gone."

The malware is modified so frequently that it is hard for security products to detect, he said.

In one example, a person who worked for a defense contractor browsed to the Shootersforum.com, a website for gun enthusiasts. A bogus ad for a gun dealer in Missouri was shown by the exchange OpenX, which automatically redirected to a free hosting site that had an exploit kit.

That kit tried to exploit a vulnerability in MicrosoftMicrosoft's Silverlight multimedia program and likely then tries to install a backdoor, which is a program that allows for persistent access to a compromised machine, Belcher said. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de