CCSD website infected?
Getting information from the heavily trafficked Clark County School District just became more dangerous.
Major web browsers today - Internet Explorer and Firefox, for example - were detecting malicious software on ccsd.net, the school district's official website.
Contacted by NPRI, a CCSD public relations spokeswoman said that the district's information technology staff had identified and removed the malicious software. However, subsequent visits from Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers still produced the same warnings.
According to the Google bad-website advisory service, www.ccsd.net is listed as "suspicious," and visitors are warned that "this web site may harm your computer."
According to Google's automated monitoring service, "Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 6 time(s) over the past 90 days," and of the 151 pages on the site tested over that period, "55 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent."
The advisory service said its last visit to the site was Sunday, June 21, 2009, and that "suspicious content" was found then.
The district website gets heavy traffic. According to the site analytics software operated by Compete.com, ccsd.net gets about 150,000 unique visitors a month. That would translate into potentially tens of thousands of visitors to the district website having faced possible risk of harmful attacks to their computers and personal privacy.
According to Google, "[M]alicious software is often installed without your knowledge or permission when you visit these sites, and can include programs that delete data on your computer, steal personal information such as passwords and credit card numbers, or alter your search results."
Websites can be programmed by malware creators to attack computers, spy, install bad software and steal information. All this can be done without the owner's knowledge. Such websites often will also infect other computers with bad software.
Make sure to have your computer anti-virus and security software up to date when you are surfing the web. To learn more about bad and malicious software being downloaded to your computer without your permission, visit http://www.stopbadware.org/.
As of 10:38 a.m. today, the StopBadWare partnership was reporting that "Google has rescanned this site and continues to report badware behavior on this site."
