The music magazine Rolling Stone has been hit by a malware campaign exploiting interest in the Grammy Awards, according to security vendor Cyphort.
Hackers were said to have used the Angler exploit kit to target the publication’s Mexican website, making use of flaws in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Adobe Flash to pull off the attack.
Nick Bilogorskiy, director of security research at Cyphort, said: "It appears the attackers timed this malware campaign to coincide with the biggest awards show in the music industry – the Grammy Awards on February 8."
This year’s show captured an audience of more than 25 million this year, a decline of three million compared to 2014, but still a significant number of potential targets from the hackers’ point of view.
The campaign makes Rolling Stone only latest site to be attacked by Angler, which in recent weeks has been seen targeting sites making use of AOL’s advertising networks, and has been connected to a wave of unpatched "zero day" Adobe Flash bugs.
Only last week the exploit kit was named the "most advanced" malware of its kind by security vendor Websense, the malware developers having pioneered features such as antivirus detection and encryption of the "dropper" files used to download malware to a system.
