A group of Chinese hackers going with the handle of DeepPanda have hacked the official sub-domain (sem.dol.gov) of US Department of Labor, as a result the site has been redirected to another link that serves visitors with malware.
A security firm Alienvault writes that Company’s director Jaime Blasco discovered the threat and suspect that it is a state-sponsored attack.
At this moment, he is not sure how the hackers got access to the Department of Labor server, neither any confirmation on what kind of data has been stolen or if any data has been accessed.
Blasco tells TheInquirer that “We have found that in US Department of Labor website, some attackers have installed malicious code that is trying to do a couple of things,” Blasco explained.
“The first thing is collecting information about which anti-virus is running on the systems of victims visiting the site and then also all the software that is running on those systems, such as PDF files, Microsoft office files, so all the information that they can gain from those systems.”
Blasco revealed that hackers also tried to take advantage of a vulnerability present Internet Explorer 10, patched few months ago.
“This was patched by Microsoft at the beginning of this year and if you don’t have your system patched the attackers will be able to exploit that vulnerability then will install a malicious payload or malware in that system,” he added.
“They can then use that malware to access that system and they can actually install the malware, extract files from your system and upload information so they can do whatever they want,” TheInquirer reports.
