Velo3D’s website has been hacked.
Saturday night I noticed that the site had a rather curious post appear on their blog, titled “Пинко казино отзывы: кому доверять в мире онлайн-игр?”
Normally, the California-based company doesn’t post in Russian, so that immediately piqued my interest. The title translates as: “Pinko Casino Reviews: Who to Trust in the World of Online Gaming?”
Oh oh, that’s a bad sign. It seems that someone has gained control of their site and injected this blog post, which apparently discusses an online casino review site. I did NOT click on the single link in the post, and neither should you.
Then I noticed a “Related Article” that was also in Russian: “Будущие события: какие спортивные события есть в БК Мосбет?”, which translates to: “Future events: what sports events are there in BC Mosbet?”, apparently discussing a sports betting site. There’s also one link in this second post, again, Do Not Click!
The remainder of Velo3D’s site seems unchanged, and the perps appear to have simply set up the two questionable posts. Unfortunately, these were (and are still as of this writing) published not only on Velo3D’s site, but also their RSS feed. That’s how we caught the news.
For Velo3D, their webmasters should be taking quick action to not only remove the errant posts as soon as possible, but also determine how the perps gained access to their site’s backend. They’ll have to perform a thorough cleaning of their entire site, and perhaps even restore it from a recent backup to be completely sure.
More than likely Velo3D has become a victim of a robotic attack to penetrate sites to put up posts and gather clicks. These nefarious systems run constantly and terrorize webmasters 24/7 with fraudulent activities. It’s possible that Velo3D had an opening, such as an exposed or guessable password, which was exploited by the evil bot. There are plenty of sites victimized in this way.
After the technical cleanup, Velo3D may still have more work to do as a result of this sudden incident: many of their customers are governments or in highly regulated industries where security is paramount. It may be that questions could be asked about the company’s security efforts, and why the hack was able to happen.
I have no doubt that Velo3D will be able to not only deal with the technical aspects of this issue quickly, but also clear up any customer concerns. It may be that by the time you read this story, they’ve already finished the cleanup. In the end, their site will have even better levels of security than it had before.
[UPDATE] Velo3D resolved the issue some time on Monday, and the site appears to be back to normal state.
Via Velo3D
