Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management systems, has detected a new worm, Net-Worm.Perl.Santy.a. This worm infects certain web sites by exploiting a vulnerability in phpBB, a popular package used to create Internet forums. Santy.a is spreading rapidly, and has caused an epidemic. However, this does not directly affect end users - although the worm infects web sites, it does not infect computers used to view these sites.
Santy.a is something of a novelty - it creates a specially formulated Google search request, which results in a list of sites running vulnerable versions of phpBB. It then sends a request containing a procedure which will trigger the vulnerability to these sites. Once the attacked server processes the request, the worm will penetrate the site, gaining control over the resource. It then repeats this routine.
News source: Kaspersky Lab
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