Samsung Telecom returns after hacker attack

Samsungtelecom.com, the Korean firm's Texas-based recruitment site, is accessible again after being down for almost two weeks following a hacker attack that resulted in the site's servers being used to host a password stealing Trojan.

On 8 September, ZDNet Australia reported that a Samsung-owned Web site in the US was hosting a Trojan horse. According to Websense, the company's server contained a Trojan Horse, which when executed, attempted to "disable antivirus programs, modify registry keys, download additional files, and log keystrokes when connecting to banking Web sites".

Later that day, the site went down and visitors to the site were greeted with an error message that read "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)".

A Samsung Australia spokesperson said on 11 September that the Trojan had been removed from the server but they could not explain why the site was still inaccessible.

The site seemed to come back to life on 21 September at approximately 3pm Sydney time (midnight in Houston, Texas).

Samsung Australia's general manager of corporate marketing Kurt Jovais told ZDNet Australia that although the site still seemed to be experiencing difficulties, consumers are unlikely to be affected as samsungtelecom.com is mainly used for recruitment purposes in Texas.

"I think there is something probably still a bit strange going on but it is not a headquarters site, it is not a regional site, it is not an Australian site; it is basically a Texas site.

"If you do want to look at products it redirects you to the Samsung.com site. So it was not a situation where it was a big consumer risk," said Jovais.