Written by Awportals.com

The infection originally noted by S E V E N S on the official Activeworlds forums was later confirmed to be the result of an automated hack, placing an encoded tracker upon the website.

The tracker, a PHP script, then proceeded to again redirect the user to another page containing an exploit suitable for infecting the OS / Browser that the client was running at the time they visited the page.

The exploit code was found to be hosted near Moscow, Russia. The last two years have seen an influx of Russian hacking groups producing such Trojan toolkits which are then sold to black-hats wishing to build up bot nets, send spam, or steal credit card information, with single installations sometimes selling for over $10,000.

It is not known how many users were infected at this time; the exploit payload appears to be a new kind of virus that has not yet been covered by most Antivirus vendors.

Users are encouraged to download Avast http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html and to run it daily.