Anti Virus Company Infects Visitors With Virus

Hackers recently hit AvSoft Technologies - causing its web servers to infect visitors' computers with the Virut virus. AvSoft Technologies produces anti virus programs Smartcop and Smartdog, mainly for the Indian and Asian market.

The hackers opened an invisible iFrame Window within the victim's browser, which redirects the client to another server. That server, in turn, launches attack code that attempts to install malicious software on the victim's computer. This technique has been seen in thousands of similar hacks over the past few months.

Fortunately, the malware used to install Virut exploits only well-known bugs, meaning that users who are running antivirus software on fully patched systems will probably not be infected by the attack in its current state, security experts say.

Nobody knows how the malware got onto the AvSoft web site in the first place. However, criminals have written automated programs that scour the Web for these types of flaws and then automatically infect sites, making this an increasingly common problem.