Today’s cyber criminals, in addition to being heartless enough to take advantage of a tragic situation like the Boston Marathon bombings are sneaky and often redirect internet searchers to a malicious site. This Friday there was an issue with the connection between Microsoft’s Bing.com website and those attempting to connect via a secure HTTPS connection. Google Chrome users attempting to connect to Bing.com received this message:

“This is probably not the site you are looking for! You attempted to reach www.bing.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as a248.e.akamai.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.bing.com. You should not proceed, especially if you have never seen this warning before for this site.”

Firefox users got a similar message. The idea of using a secure connection means that the websites you visit will “present” a trusted certificate of identification to prove that the site you mean to visit is the one you are actually going to end up at. When there is a redirect or as it appears in this case a glitch in the system, your browser may refuse to connect to that site. It is recommended that regardless of whether the problem is a glitch or an actual attempt to hack into your network, that you not ignore the prompt and continue to the site.

Malicious sites could end up placing a Trojan horse, a virus or a similar ‘back-door’ that they can use later to break into your site and shut your computer down from the inside. There could be an attempt to steal the identities of customers, employees, or vendors. Keep your security tight and all firewalls and virus protection current to keep you and your company safe from these devastating attacks.

To be laconic, one can only say that it’s bizarre to see people spreading malwares and Trojans by taking advantage of such sad incidents. The need to time is to care and by taking some precautions we can easily avoid these Trojans. We need to search and look for websites that are appropriate and shouldn’t go for everything that is available. Many websites contain such type of Trojans, so we need to be very cautious.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.