Biotechnology Information Organization site compromise

Date:08.17.2007

Threat Type: Malicious Web site / Malicious Code

Websense® Security Labs™ has discovered a malicious script on the official site of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (www.bio.org). This script can infect a visitor's machine and attempt to exploit multiple vulnerabilities. The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO)'s Web site is commonly visited by members of the biotech industry.

To date we have seen infected pages only within the news and public relations sections of their site. This same exploit is used by the people behind the attack on Syndicate Bank of India, about which we issued an alert earlier today.

Update 8/29/07: We have been in direct contact with the system administrators from the IT department of BIO, and they were very accommodating in their response. They took immediate action to repair their security hole and restored their web site to its previous condition. We have since re-classified it back to its normal category.

Screenshots of the infected pages and their source code: