Amnesty's UK website comes under cyber attack

IT | Kirsty Weakley | 14 May 2012

Amnesty International has reassured users that their personal details are safe following a malware attack on its UK website last week.

Amnesty.org.uk was infected with the Trojan Gh0st RAT last Thursday, which attempts to steal users’ personal data, such as email addresses and passwords.

In a statement the charity told civilsociety.co.uk that: “All our users profiles are held on a completely separate website and server and were in no way compromised by this incident.”

The attack was first noticed by security company, Websense which informed Amnesty. The charity then worked with its hosting company, Claranet, “to isolate and remove it as a matter of urgency” and the malware was removed by lunchtime on Thursday.

Amnesty stressed that: “Security is very important to us and as well as extensive security measures in place to prevent exploits such as this, we also have constant monitoring in place to alert us immediately when incidents like this occur.”

It is not the first time the charity has experienced a cyber attack of this nature, in 2009 the UK site was attacked and in 2010 the Hong Kong site was infected with similar malware.

Directory: Amnesty International

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