Call It Flat Pack Spam

Ikea’s servers have been infiltrated by hackers, who have used them to send malware.

It’s bad enough when you have to put together a piece of flat pack from Ikea. All those screws, making sure you have each piece the right wayround…then taking it apart again when you realize you’ve made a mistake. It’s made furniture cheaper, but far more stressful.   More recently, though, the company hasunwittingly been putting a different kind of stress in peoples’ live, according to a Vnunet report.   It turns out there was a large hole in itssecurity that gave hackers access to its servers, letting them bulk mail spam and malware from the Ikea address. The incident was discovered by security company Tier-3.   Given the legitimate address, the spam wouldn’t have been caught by most e-mail filters. Among the malware sent were zero-day Trojans and root kitTrojans.   Geoff Sweeney, CTO at Tier-3, explained,   "Ikea’s problems were caused because the contact template on the firm’s home page was inadequately secured, allowing hackers toinsert alternative email addresses in a contact form. This basically allowed anyone with a little technical knowledge to generate millions of phishing and/or spam messages from Ikea’s mail serversusing a simple script."   Remarkably, it took Ikea five days to close the hole after they’d been informed about it. Maybe they couldn’t find the Allen wrench.