Paypal Phishing landing pages hosted at HostGator

Published: 2016-03-06. Last Updated: 2016-03-07 19:35:46 UTC
by Rick Wanner (Version: 2)
3 comment(s)

It appears that a large number of websites, approximately 500, hosted on IP 192.185.225.116 are being used as PayPal Phishing landing pages.  That IP is registered to websitewelcome.com, but we have been told by customers that the IP is in use by popular U.S. based web hosting company HostGator.

When the FQDN of a legitimate web page on that IP is appended with:

~pbhanney/goobooker/avatars/user_uploaded/manage/ffe02d0542523d2fca9d479a2b50a948/

for example 

hxxp://24efitness.com/~pbhanney/goobooker/avatars/user_uploaded/manage/ffe02d0542523d2fca9d479a2b50a948/

will take you to a PayPal login landing page.

Google seems to be aware of the issue and is warning on attempts to access the pages.

The issue has been reported to both HostGator and Paypal, so hopefully they can clean it up soon.

 

Update: As of 2016-03-07.  HostGator has cleaned up these landing pages.

 

-- Rick Wanner MSISE - rwanner at isc dot sans dot edu - http://namedeplume.blogspot.com/ - Twitter:namedeplume (Protected)

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3 comment(s)

Comments

This is probably due to the large number of Wordpress sites that Hostgator hosts due to easy one-click installs, and also due to those installs not being kept up to date or having vulnerable plugins (like Tinythumb).

Former Hostgator employee here. Seen it before. Lots of emails out about compromised sites. Many people wonder what's up when we lock their site since they've been ignoring the emails we send out.

Anonymous

Mar 7th 2016
8 years ago

HostGator
Ticket: ICU-42611120
Hello,

My name is Andrew from our Customer Service Management department. First and foremost I would like to apologize on behalf of HostGator for any frustrations related to these issues.

I see that we received phishing reports related to another account on the same server as you. We have disabled the phishing content and reached out to the owner of the account to notify them of this.

If you do run into any other phishing sites please let us know. This article will provide you details on how to report this to us so it can be reviewed properly.
http://support.hostgator.com/articles/pre-sales-policies/where-can-i-report-abuse-and-or-spamming

If you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to contact us at your convenience by responding to this ticket, calling 1-866-964-2867, or using our live chat at https://chat.hostgator.com/


Best regards,

Andrew M.
Customer Service Manager
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

So content from 'another' customer can appear across 500 other customer's sites??

Anonymous

Mar 7th 2016
8 years ago

Not quite. Hostgator's bulk of business comes from shared hosting. They cram some 2000-odd people onto the same server. That's why it's so cheap. You should never see another's content, barring some strange bug in cPanel.

Now, there *have* been bugs in WHM (the administrative panel in cPanel) in the past that allowed for bulk exploitation. But I doubt this is the case.

Anonymous

Mar 8th 2016
8 years ago

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