Serial security hackers hit F-secure

F-Secure admitted on Thursday that it had been hit by the same Romanian group that previously hit Kaspersky Lab and Bitdefender's reseller-run Portugese website over recent days.

All three of the attacks used SQL Injection techniques. F-secure said the impact of the attack against its systems was minimal, and only affected servers normally used for collating malware statistics.

In a blog posting, the Finnish security firm said that even though the impact of the attack was "minimal" it pointed towards improvements it needed to make to guard against further (possibly more aggressive) attacks.

One of our servers used in gathering malware statistics had a page that didn't properly sanitize input and was therefore vulnerable to attack. Fortunately we utilize defense-in-depth strategies so the attack was only partly successful.

Although the attackers were able to read information from the database they couldn't write or manipulate it. And they couldn't access any other data on that server because the SQL user only had access to its own database, which only contains public information that is shown on our statistics pages. So while the attack is something we must learn from and points at things we need to improve, it's not the end of the world.

The malware statistics are something we publish anyway at worldmap.f-secure.com and because of our IT security strategy, the impact was minimal.

A posting on hacking forums about the F-secure attack backs up the security firm's version of events.

Any security incident involving an information security supplier is serious but in the case of the F-secure hack, unlike the attacks 0n usa.kasperky.com and bitdefeder.pt, no customer information was exposed. ®