Naked Chef serves up pot roast with a side of exploits

Foodies looking for inspiration for that pork belly might want to avoid the recipe from the Naked Chef’s website, jamieoliver[dot]com. That is, until the website stops serving up an exploit for Flash Player.

Jamie Oliver has one of the most popular websites in the UK, attracting an average of 10 million visits per month. But while it normally offers up easy recipes, it’s now also serving something more unsavoury: an exploit kit, which attempts to attack a fresh flaw in Adobe Flash, as well bugs in outdated versions of Silverlight and Java.

The specific Flash flaw being targeted via Jamie Oliver’s site has been designated the identifier CVE-2015-0311, Jérôme Segura, a senior security researcher at Malwarebytes told CSO Australia. Segura said the exploits for Silverlight (CVE-2013-0074) and Java were older.

The firm brought attention to the issue on Tuesday.

Fortunately, Adobe did release an update that fixed that flaw in late January, which means users with the latest version of Flash Player installed aren’t affected. Windows and Mac systems running Adobe Flash Player version 16.0.0.287 however are vulnerable. (The most current version is 16.0.0.296 for Mac and Windows).

Within a week of an official fix for that bug being made available, several exploit kits had integrated the attack, including the Fiesta kit that’s aiming at Jamie Oliver’s visitors. The rapid distribution of the exploit serves as a reminder that users should update immediately.

“If the user’s machine is not fully patched, a malicious dropper is downloaded and runs [that] Malwarebytes Anti-Malware detects is as Trojan.Dorkbot.ED,” Malwarebytes said. Currently, only two out of 52 antivirus engines recognise the threat.

Machines compromised by the malware will see their searches hijacked and will be redirected to sites that encourage victims to install bogus software updates that ultimately cause more troubles than they claim to solve.

The attack on Jamie Oliver’s site follows a recent uptick in the use of malicious online ads to infect users that visit popular sites. For example, the same Flash flaw was used to attack visitors to Dailymotion last month before Adobe patched the flaw.

Read more: Yahoo accounts hijacked via email-based attack: Bitdefender

In this case, attackers have compromised Jamie Oliver’s website and were able to hide a malicious JavaScript injection, which redirects visitors to an intermediary site antkai[dot]com that hosts the exploit.

Malwarebytes said it has contacted the administrators of Jamie Oliver’s website about the issue.

"The team at jamieoliver.com found a low level malware problem and dealt with it quickly. The site is now safe to use. We have had only a handful of comments from users over the last couple of days, and no-one has reported any serious issues. We apologise to anyone who was at all worried after going on the site. The Jamie Oliver website is regularly checked for vulnerabilities by both our in-house team and an independent third party and they quickly deal with anything that is found. The team is confident that no data has been compromised in this incident but if anyone is worried, do please use the contact form on the site."

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.


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Tags javajavascriptWindowssilverlightAdobe Flash playerflash playerCSO AustraliaMac systemsintegrated attackssenior securityFoodiesjamieoliver[dot]com.Naked ChefJérôme Segura

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