The Daily Jang - The Online Pakistani Newspaper Jang.com.pk Compromised

Websense Security Labs™ ThreatSeeker® network has determined that the popular online Pakistani newspaper Web site the 'Daily Jang' (at jang.com.pk) has been compromised.


The Web site has been injected with malicious code in several locations. The code redirects visitor browsers to exploit Web sites. At the time this writing, the exploit sites that the Daily Jang redirects to are active and serve malicious code.


The paper is one of the most popular and oldest newspapers in Pakistan. The Web site gets a lot of daily traffic from its many loyal readers, both within and outside Pakistan. It also links to many other Web sites (Alexa report). Some reports indicate an average of more than 40,000 unique visits to the Web site a month. 


An infection can occur while visiting the main page of the site. The visiting user's browser is redirected silently, in the background, to an exploit site loaded with an exploit kit called 'g01pack' (we blogged not long ago about mass injections leading to this exploit kit). If one of the kit's many exploit attempts is successful, a Trojan Backdoor file is dropped onto the user's machine. The backdoor file currently holds a detection rate of 26%.


Fireshark can map exactly what happens to the browser when surfing to a Web address. When jang.com.pk is loaded to Fireshark, at the end of the process Fireshark creates a visual map of all of the connections made by the browser during the site visit. In the image below, the malicious Web site that the browser connects to when visiting jang.com.pk is marked with the color red and the string TLD vv.cc(jang.com.pk is also marked in red because it is compromised).