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Malicious obfuscated code becoming sophisticated

Online security expert Finjan has released its latest Malicious Page of the Month Report highlighting the growing sophistication and effectiveness of malicious obfuscated code.

The company has revealed that its Malicious Code Research Center has discovered examples of obfuscated code that are embedded in rich-content files including HTML web pages on legitimate websites.

According chief technology officer Yuval Ben-Itzhak, cyber crooks are now using online ads and user-generated content to direct users to malware-infected content files.

"Since JavaScript is the most-used scripting language for communication with web browsers, third-party applications such as Flash player, PDF readers and other multimedia applications have added support for JavaScript as part of their application," he said.

"This offers crimeware authors the opportunity to inject malicious code into rich-content files used by Ads and user-generated content on Web 2.0 websites."

According to the secure web gateway products manufacturer, code obfuscation has grown over the last four years from character-based encoding to rich-content files and remains the most preferred method of attack by cyber crooks.

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