Asian entertainment website Crunchyroll.com is blaming a DNS hijack attack after site visitors in the early morning of Nov. 4 were redirected to a malicious website designed to infect them with malware.
According to a blog post from Crunchyroll parent company Ellation, attackers altered the video streaming website's Cloudflare configuration so that visitors were pushed to an external server that downloaded a malicious file called CrunchViewer.exe, which targets Windows PC web users.
Crunchyroll said the attack took place on Saturday around 3:30 a.m. PST and lasted for approximately two-and-a-half hours. The company responded by taking its site down around 6 a.m. PST and restoring the correct configuration at roughly 9 a.m.
“We've identified this as an isolated attack on our Cloudflare layer, and not Crunchyroll itself. As such, our servers were not compromised in any way, and none of our users' secure information and data was at risk,” announced Crunchroll, whose entertainment offerings include anime and manga.
However, in his own Nov. 4 blog post, security researcher Bart Blaze states that so far he has found "no evidence" that an DNS hijack occurred, instead asserting that the perpetrator seems to have hacked the website. Citing the malware analysis service ANY.RUN, Blaze also reported in his blog post that the malware downloaded Meterpreter, a post-exploitation backdoor tool derived from the pen-testing framework Metasploit.
