jQuery.com Malware Attack Puts Privileged Enterprise IT Accounts at Risk

On September 18, 2014, RiskIQ detected credential-stealing malware being loaded onto users’ computers through a drive-by download at jQuery.com. The attack was carried out using RIG exploit kit to target visitors. RiskIQ was able to confirm with sources at several large organizations that users of jQuery.com were indeed redirected to this exploit kit.

The jQuery library is a very popular toolkit for developing websites with dynamic content and is widely used by developers within enterprises. According to internal jQuery research, jQuery is used by 30% of websites on the entire Internet, including 70% of the top 10,000 websites in the world.

It’s important to note that we did not observe any changes within the jQuery library itself, which was likely unaffected by this compromise. However, discovering information-stealing malware on jQuery.com is particularly disconcerting because of the demographic of jQuery users. jQuery users are generally IT Systems Administrators and Web Developers, including a large contingent who work within enterprises.

Typically, these individuals have privileged access to web properties, backend systems and other critical infrastructure. Planting malware capable of stealing credentials on devices owned by privilege accounts holders inside companies could allow attackers to silently compromise enterprise systems, similar to what happened in the infamous Target breach.

RIG was first uncovered in April 2014 and caught the attention of Cisco researchers in June. In the past, RiskIQ and Symantec researchers have observed RIG on popular websites such as askmen.com. Typically, RIG has been observed dropping banking trojans and other information stealers.

Planting malware on open source websites is not a new technique. These websites are high value targets due to the type of users that frequent them. Several other high profile, open source websites have had this issue in the past. For example, in 2013 PHP.net suffered similar problems, along with MySQL.com in 2011.

We recommend the following if you suspect a system has been affected by this campaign:

• Immediately re-image system
• Reset passwords for user accounts that have been used on the system
• See if any suspicious activity has originated from the offending system

Technical Details:

Using our site-scanning technology, we were able to detect a change within jQuery.com. Approximately 10-15 minutes after our system detected it, we analyzed the site and detected that a malicious script tag was added. This malicious script then added an invisible iframe that redirected users to RIG exploit kit, which is typically used to drop banking trojans as well as other information stealers.

Initial content added to jQuery.com:

Redirection Sequence:

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