Transocean's deepwater.com hosts malware exploits
Transocean, the offshore drilling contractor at the center of the world's biggest marine oil spill in the history of petroleum production, has been caught spewing a virtual sort of toxic sludge, according to a report released Thursday.
Researchers at web security firm Websense said deepwater.com, Transocean's official website, has been hosting malicious exploit code that attempts to install malware on the machines of people who visit the site. The researchers counted at least two separate attacks included in several deepwater.com pages that exploit known vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and Adobe's Flash media player.
Only 16 percent of the top 44 antivirus programs detected the latter exploit, the Websense report said, citing this analysis from Virustotal. The exploit code is stashed in invisible iframe tags planted on Transocean's site, the report said.
