MSN Korea Hacked, Shut Down
MSN was forced to take its South Korean Web site down for ten hours on Thursday after hackers broke into the site and added code to attempt to steal user passwords. While Microsoft said the news section of the site was the only part affected, the company removed the entire site as a precaution to ensure other areas were not compromised.
It is not immediately clear if any of MSN's users were affected by the hack. The news section was down for almost a day while the site was cleaned.
According to Microsoft spokespeople, the hack took advantage of an IFrame vulnerability in the Internet Explorer Web browser. The company released a patch for the flaw in December of last year.
South Korean's MSN site is one of the most popular sites among Korean Web surfers, and its English equivalent is the MSN.com homepage. However, unlike MSN.com, the South Korean version is not directly operated by Microsoft, but through a third party.
The hack was noticed by researchers on Tuesday who immediately contacted MSN about the attack. No one could say yet how long the malicious code was on the Web site before it was detected.
According to Microsoft, its English-based websites are not vulnerable to the attack. However, the same code has appeared on other hacked Chinese sites according to researchers.
Microsoft said it is working with law enforcement and will take legal action against the hackers if and when they are indentified.