Entries Tagged "Internet"

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Search Redirection and the Illicit Online Prescription Drug Trade

Really interesting research.

Search-redirection attacks combine several well-worn tactics from black-hat SEO and web security. First, an attacker identifies high-visibility websites (e.g., at universities) that are vulnerable to code-injection attacks. The attacker injects code onto the server that intercepts all incoming HTTP requests to the compromised page and responds differently based on the type of request:
Requests from search-engine crawlers return a mix of the original content, along with links to websites promoted by the attacker and text that makes the website appealing to drug-related queries.

  • Requests from users arriving from search engines are checked for drug terms in the original search query. If a drug name is found in the search term, then the compromised server redirects the user to a pharmacy or another intermediary, which then redirects the user to a pharmacy.
  • All other requests, including typing the link directly into a browser, return the infected website’s original content.
  • The net effect is that web users are seamlessly delivered to illicit pharmacies via infected web servers, and the compromise is kept hidden from view of the affected host’s webmaster in nearly all circumstances.

Upon inspecting search results, we identified 7,000 websites that had been compromised in this manner between April 2010 and February 2011. One quarter of the top ten search results were observed to actively redirect to pharmacies, and another 15% of the top results were for sites that no longer redirected but had previously been compromised. We also found that legitimate health resources, including authorized pharmacies, were largely crowded out of the top results by search-redirection attacks and blog and forum spam promoting fake pharmacies.

And the paper.

Posted on August 16, 2011 at 10:47 AM • View Comments

New Bank-Fraud Trojan

Nasty:

The German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short) recently warned consumers about a new Windows malware strain that waits until the victim logs in to his bank account. The malware then presents the customer with a message stating that a credit has been made to his account by mistake, and that the account has been frozen until the errant payment is transferred back.

When the unwitting user views his account balance, the malware modifies the amounts displayed in his browser; it appears that he has recently received a large transfer into his account. The victim is told to immediately make a transfer to return the funds and unlock his account. The malicious software presents an already filled-in online transfer form ­ with the account and routing numbers for a bank account the attacker controls.

Posted on August 8, 2011 at 12:47 PM • View Comments

ShareMeNot

ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on for preventing tracking from third-party buttons (like the Facebook “Like” button or the Google “+1” button) until the user actually chooses to interact with them. That is, ShareMeNot doesn’t disable/remove these buttons completely. Rather, it allows them to render on the page, but prevents the cookies from being sent until the user actually clicks on them, at which point ShareMeNot releases the cookies and the user gets the desired behavior (i.e., they can Like or +1 the page).

Posted on July 28, 2011 at 2:02 PM • View Comments

Google Detects Malware in its Search Data

This is interesting:

As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our data centers. After collaborating with security engineers at several companies that were sending this modified traffic, we determined that the computers exhibiting this behavior were infected with a particular strain of malicious software, or “malware.” As a result of this discovery, today some people will see a prominent notification at the top of their Google web search results….

There’s a lot that Google sees as a result of it’s unique and prominent position in the Internet. Some of it is going to be stuff they never considered. And while they use a lot of it to make money, it’s good of them to give this one back to the Internet users.

Posted on July 20, 2011 at 6:23 AM • View Comments

Protecting Private Information on Smart Phones

AppFence is a technology—with a working prototype—that protects personal information on smart phones. It does this by either substituting innocuous information in place of sensitive information or blocking attempts by the application to send the sensitive information over the network.

The significance of systems like AppFence is that they have the potential to change the balance of power in privacy between mobile application developers and users. Today, application developers get to choose what information an application will have access to, and the user faces a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: users must either grant all the permissions requested by the application developer or abandon installation. Take-it-or-leave it offers may make it easier for applications to obtain access to information that users don’t want applications to have. Many applications take advantage of this to gain access to users’ device identifiers and location for behavioral tracking and advertising. Systems like AppFence could make it harder for applications to access these types of information without more explicit consent and cooperation from users.

The problem is that the mobile OS providers might not like AppFence. Google probably doesn’t care, but Apple is one of the biggest consumers of iPhone personal information. Right now, the prototype only works on Android, because it requires flashing the phone. In theory, the technology can be made to work on any mobile OS, but good luck getting Apple to agree to it.

Posted on June 24, 2011 at 6:37 AM • View Comments

New French Law Reduces Website Security

I didn’t know about this:

The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.

This includes users’ full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.

Police, the fraud office, customs, tax and social security bodies will all have the right of access.

The social benefits of anonymity aside, we’re all more secure if these websites do not have a file of everyone’s plaintext password.

EDITED TO ADD (4/12): Seems that the BBC article misstated the law. Companies have to retain information they already collect for a year after it is no longer required. So if they’re not already storing plaintext passwords, they don’t have to start.

Posted on April 11, 2011 at 1:20 PM • View Comments

Pinpointing a Computer to Within 690 Meters

This is impressive, and scary:

Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location. The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres.

Now, Yong Wang, a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy.

These organisations often host their websites on servers kept on their premises, meaning the servers’ IP addresses are tied to their physical location. Wang’s team used Google Maps to find both the web and physical addresses of such organisations, providing them with around 76,000 landmarks. By comparison, most other geolocation methods only use a few hundred landmarks specifically set up for the purpose.

The new method zooms in through three stages to locate a target computer. The first stage measures the time it takes to send a data packet to the target and converts it into a distance—a common geolocation technique that narrows the target’s possible location to a radius of around 200 kilometres.

Wang and colleagues then send data packets to the known Google Maps landmark servers in this large area to find which routers they pass through. When a landmark machine and the target computer have shared a router, the researchers can compare how long a packet takes to reach each machine from the router; converted into an estimate of distance, this time difference narrows the search down further. “We shrink the size of the area where the target potentially is,” explains Wang.

Finally, they repeat the landmark search at this more fine-grained level: comparing delay times once more, they establish which landmark server is closest to the target. The result can never be entirely accurate, but it’s much better than trying to determine a location by converting the initial delay into a distance or the next best IP-based method. On average their method gets to within 690 metres of the target and can be as close as 100 metres—good enough to identify the target computer’s location to within a few streets.

Posted on April 8, 2011 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.