February 26, 2024 By Bill Toulas
Threat actors are exploiting a CMS editor discontinued 14 years ago to compromise education and government entities worldwide to poison search results with malicious sites or scams.
Open redirects are when websites, whether intentionally or through a flaw, allow arbitrary redirection requests that take users from the original site to an external URL without adequate validation or security checks.
For example, if there was a URL at https://www.example.com/?redirect=<url> that redirects visitors to the specified URL, and anyone could modify that URL to a site of their choosing, it would be considered an open redirect.
Attackers abuse these open redirects to perform phishing attacks, distribute malware, or scam users while appearing to originate from legitimate domains. As the URLs are hosted on trusted domains, it may allow them to bypass URL filters used by security products.
