Visitors to Sony Playstation website at risk of malware infections

Researchers at Sophos are warning lovers of video games that pages on the US-based Sony PlayStation website have been compromised by hackers. Experts have discovered that cybercriminals have injected unauthorized code on pages promoting the PlayStation games ‘SingStar Pop’ and ‘God of War’.

At the time of writing the hacker’s code attempts to dupe web surfers by running a fake anti-virus scan and displaying a bogus message that their computer is infected with a variety of different viruses and Trojan horses. The hackers’ aim is to scare unsuspecting computer users into purchasing a bogus security product. The attacks are known as SQL injections.

Sophos warns, however, that it would be trivial for the hackers who have compromised the webpages to alter the payload so that it became more malicious, and installed code designed to harvest confidential information from users, or turn innocent victims’ PCs into botnets which the cybercriminals could use to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks and spread spam messages.