However, the attack was uncovered yesterday. "This was fairly
epic," said Alex Eckelberry, who heads Sunbelt Software, one of the firms that uncovered the attack. Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains were used in the attack and that most were Chinese
registered and hosted in the U.S. He said the attack could be a harbinger of many more to come.
As usual, the malicious software exploited weaknesses in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "If
your machine was not fully patched, you were going to get hosed," Eckelberry said. He added that the fake Web sites were only programmed to show on Google.com, even though Yahoo and MSN's crawlers
also indexed them.