Security Firm Trend Micro’s Blog Falls Victim To Content Spoofing Attack

In an era of unprecedented cyberthreats, many organisations turn to security firms for guidance on how to prevent and respond to incidents, and to their researchers for information about the latest threats.

But just to illustrate that you can never be too careful, cybersecurity specialist Trend Micro has confirmed that one of the blogs it uses to communicate with customers was itself the victim of a content spoofing attack.

The culprits exploited a vulnerability in WordPress to inject fake content onto the blog before it was removed by Trend Micro and the bug fixed.

WATCH: TrendMicro’s Rik Ferguson speaks to Silicon at InfoSec 2016

Trend Micro attack

Global head of security research Rik Ferguson confirmed the ‘low level’ incident to Silicon and said it goes to show how breaches are an unfortunate fact of life and that companies should be judged on how they respond.

“We got reports from many researchers, regarding attacks using this vector and we deployed a custom policy to block the attacks,” he explained.

“Unfortunately there are many different URLs attackers can use to carry out the same attack, so a couple of fake ‘articles’ ended up posted on CounterMeasures. We have responded and shut down the vulnerability completely to resolve the issue

“Just serves to demonstrate something that I have often repeated in presentations, we are all a potential victim of digital attacks and we can’t afford to take our eyes off the ball at any time. The best way to respond to any attack of this nature is with honesty and alacrity, and that’s what we have endeavoured to do.

“Of course technology and best practice can mitigate the vast majority of intrusion attempts, but when one is successful, even one as low-level as this, you are more defined by how you respond than you are by the fact that it happened.”

One notable content spoofing attack hijacked router DNS settings to intercept Google Analytics tags and replace them with pornography and adverts.

Are you a security pro? Try our quiz!