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A campaign that deployed a gift card and Fortnite spam has targeted multiple United States university websites that leverages the MediaWiki and Twiki. Based on reports, Wiki, and documentation pages hosted by several universities such as Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, UMass Amherst, and Stanford suffered the spam attack.
Other researchers confirmed that the attack is an ongoing operation that has already added more educational websites like the University of Michigan.
The Fortnite spam operators are still trying to infect academic institutions that use Wiki sites.
According to investigations, a dozen sub-domains owned by well-known United States universities are affected by the Fortnite spam. These university websites seem to be operating either on MediaWiki or TWiki. The first wiki site is a CMS platform that authorises Wikipedia and several Wikimedia sites.
These wiki webpages bait readers into visiting malicious websites that claim to be offering digital currency and artefacts like gift cards, cheats, and Fortnite Bucks. However, these domains contain load fake Fortnite pages that are effectively phishing forms instructing users to provide their credentials.
In other instances, these sites make false promises of gift cards for users in exchange for completing fake surveys.
Furthermore, this malicious campaign has exclusively targeted university websites with MediaWiki, but some researchers believe that the same campaign has already targeted government websites internationally.
Some confirmed sites affected by the attack include mini websites from a Brazilian state government and a European Union website.
The European Union website seems to have problems against spammers that abuse its e-Portfolio service. The portfolio is a job search portal that allows European residents to generate and upload their CVs and cover letters as PDFs.
The researchers could yet identify the attacker’s exploit to upload spam pages and PDF archives to websites owned by legitimate organisations.
TWiki and MediaWiki system admins should review their websites for spam and infectious content. Moreover, they should prioritise scouring their systems with keywords such as Fortnite and gift cards. Experts also suggest that users avoid accessing sketchy websites within Wiki pages, especially if they offer products too good to be true.
