Malware “Willysy” Infects More than 6 Million E-Commerce Web Pages

August 7, 2011 by: Trish 1

It’s only taken less than 14 days for a malware injection to target and infect more than 6 million e-commerce web pages. Known as “willysy,” the malware exploits a vulnerability in osCommerce, which is a popular online merchant platform.

According to Armorize, which is a security provider based out of San Francisco, initially notified the world about Willysy, there were 90,000 infected paged. That was on July 24. Now there are more than 6.3 million pages and it just keeps growing.

Armorize could not identify who was responsible for the malware attacks, but did trace them to eight different IP addresses that were all located in the Ukraine. According to Amorize, the attacks exploit vulnerabilities in osCommerce version 2.2. Then it injects a malicious JavaScript code into the web page of the site. Then it can easily infect the computers of the online store’s visitors.

Once a visitor’s computer is infected, the malware goes to work targeting vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader, Java, Internet Explorer, and Windows Help Center. While the flaws in these programs have been patched, the people responsible for the attacks are betting that visitors haven’t patched them all.

The malware can be prevented simply by osCommerce sites upgrading to version 2.3, which was released in November 2010. There have been two more patches released since then, 2.3.1 and 3.0.1. According to osCommerce, almost a quarter of a million store owners use the open source software, as well as service providers, developers, and other enthusiasts.

According to Frank Kenny, who is a former analyst for Gartner, these attacks can be really harmful for small and medium sized companies. Most of these businesses doen’t have the necessary resources financially to use custom programs for their online store. Instead, they rely on off the shelf software and open source programs. Kenny said, “Whenever you use off-the-shelf software, you have to understand there are data issues and all types of security vulnerabilities that exist.”