Security News > 2022 > November > Hundreds of U.S. news sites hit in SocGholish supply-chain attack
Threat actors are using the compromised infrastructure of an undisclosed media company to deploy the SocGholish JavaScript malware framework on the websites of hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. The threat actor behind this supply-chain attack has injected malicious code into a benign JavaScript file that gets loaded by the news outlets' websites.
"Proofpoint Threat Research has observed intermittent injections on a media company that serves many major news outlets. This media company serves content via Javascript to its partners," Proofpoint's Threat Insight team revealed today in a Twitter thread. "By modifying the codebase of this otherwise benign JS, it is now used to deploy SocGholish."
In total, the malware has been installed on sites belonging to more than 250 U.S. news outlets, some of them being major news organizations, according to security researchers at enterprise security firm Proofpoint.
While the total number of impacted news organizations is currently unknown, Proofpoint says it knows of affected media organizations from New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and more.
Proofpoint has previously observed SocGholish campaigns using fake updates and website redirects to infect users, including, in some cases, ransomware payloads.
The Evil Corp cybercrime gang also used SocGholish in a very similar campaign to infect the employees of more than 30 major U.S. private firms via fake software update alerts delivered via dozens of compromised U.S. newspaper websites.
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