Malware Affects US PlayStation Site ? News

A press release from Sophos, a leading IT security firm, today warned that visitors of certain pages on the US Playstation website are at risk of malware infection.

Alleging that pages for both SingStar Pop and God of War prompts a pop-up window alerting readers to the fact that their computer contains malicious files, the malware then urges readers to fork out cash to download a bogus security product.

"There are millions of video game lovers around the world, many of whom will visit Sony's PlayStation website regularly to find out more about the latest console games. Most would never expect that surfing to a website like this could potentially infect them with malware. If users do not have sufficient protection in place then they might find that before they know it they have been scared into handing their credit card details over to a bunch of cybercriminals," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"It is essential that all websites, especially high profile ones like this, have been properly hardened to prevent hackers from injecting malicious code on to what should be legitimate webpages."

Sophos identifies the malware as being Troj/Iframe-AG and Mal/Badsrc and describes the method of attack as an SQL injection.

At the time of writing, TVG dared infection and visited the allegedly infected pages but didn't actually come across the reported alert; perhaps SCEA's techies have eradicated the problem already.

TVG contacted representatives from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for a comment, but was informed that this wasn't possible due to the alleged attack targeting the US site specifically.