A major global website was recently hit by cybercriminals, with the hacked website turning visitors into "zombies" that in turn launched distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. A Persistent XSS vulnerability gave cybercriminals the chance to embed malicious JavaScript code, according to enterprise security company Incapsula.
Each user that views a compromised profile image with the malicious code then ends up sending a GET request to targeted websites. The group responsible also posted comments on large quantities of other videos, to ensure the profile image was viewed as many times as possible.
"As a result, each time a legitimate visitor landed on that page, his browser automatically executed the injected JavaScript, which in turn injected a hidden