Investigative journalist Brian Krebs has uncovered an unusual botnet that forces infected PCs to scour websites for security vulnerabilities that can cough up proprietary data or be exploited in drive-by malware attacks.
The botnet, dubbed "Advanced Power" by its operators, has discovered at least 1,800 webpages vulnerable to SQL injection attacks since May, Krebs reported in a post published Monday. SQL injection vulnerabilities exploit weaknesses in Web applications that allow attackers to send powerful commands to a website's backend databases. From there, attackers can download login credentials or other database contents or cause sites to post links that silently redirect visitors to malicious websites.
Advanced Power masquerades as a legitimate add-on for Mozilla's Firefox browser. Once installed, it looks for vulnerabilities on sites visited by the infected machine. Krebs wrote:
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