Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari are actively blocking direct access to The Pirate Bay. Kickass Torrents suffered such a similar incident last month, because of the intermediary confirmation screen that appeared every time users navigated away from the site.

The reason why these three browsers block access to The Pirate Bay is unknown, but it could be related to a malvertising campaign that has plagued the site for more than two weeks. Two weeks ago, the malvertising campaign intensified right when season six of Game of Thrones premiered.
Meanwhile, HBO is contacting sites asking them to remove Game of Thrones torrents, and sending thousands of copyright infringement warnings to ISPs, urging them to remind pirates that they can stream HBO content legally after purchasing a subscription to HBO.

An anonymous reader shares a PCWorld article: Attackers are aggressively pushing a new file-encrypting ransomware program called CryptXXX by compromising websites, the latest victim being U.S. toy maker Maisto. Fortunately, there's a tool that can help users decrypt CryptXXX affected files for free. Security researchers from Malwarebytes reported Thursday that maisto.com was infected with malicious JavaScript that loaded the Angler exploit kit. This is a Web-based attack tool that installs malware on users' computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in their browser plug-ins. It also steals bitcoins from local wallets, a double hit to victims, because it then asks for the equivalent of $500 in bitcoins in order to decrypt their files. [...] Researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab recently updated their ransomware decryption toolto add support for CryptXXX affected files. The attack code exploits vulnerabilities in older versions of applications such as Flash, Java, Internet Explorer, and Silverlight. At this point, it isn't clear exactly how many users are affected.

An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, Google announced it is making changes to Chrome Web Store's User Data Policy to ensure developers are more transparent about how their extensions handle customer data. The company has notified developers and is giving them three months to comply with the changes. Come July 15, 2016, company says, extensions that violate the policy will be removed from the Chrome Web Store.The announcement comes amid a report that pointed out a rogue extension in the Chrome Web Store. The incident was one of many we have seen in the past few months. Following are the requirements that a developer must meet: 1. Be transparent about the handling of user data and disclose privacy practices. 2. Post a privacy policy and use encryption, when handling personal or sensitive information. 3. Ask users to consent to the collection of personal or sensitive data via a prominent disclosure, when the use of the data isn't related to a prominent feature.

itwbennett writes: In a lawsuit filed January 8, 2016, Enigma Software, maker of anti-malware software SpyHunter, accuses self-help portal Bleeping Computer of making 'false, disparaging, and defamatory statements.' At issue: a bad review posted by a user in September, 2014. The lawsuit also accuses Bleeping Computer of profiting from driving traffic to competitor Malwarebytes via affiliate links: 'Bleeping has a direct financial interest in driving traffic and sales to Malwarebytes and driving traffic and sales away from ESG.' Perhaps not helping matters, one of the first donations to a fund set up by Bleeping Computer to help with legal costs came from Malwarebytes.

An anonymous reader writes: Ransomware has locked computers in three major Indian banks and one pharmaceutical company. While the ransom note asks for 1 Bitcoin, so many computers have been infected that damages racked up millions of dollars. According to an antivirus company that analyzed the ransomware, it's not even that complex, and seems the work of some amateur Russians.

An anonymous reader writes: Malwarebytes has caught one of Symantec's resellers running a tech support scam that was scaring users into thinking they were infected with malware and then graciously offering to sell Symantec's security software at inflated rates. Malwarebytes played along with their scam and found out the company behind it was Silurian Tech Support, located somewhere in North India. Symantec told El Reg that it terminated the reseller's contract and will work with law enforcement to defend its brand and intellectual property.

An anonymous reader writes: Hackers have set up a clever new clickjacking campaign taking advantage of pop-up alerts that European users are (by now) accustomed to see: the "EU Cookie Law" notifications. The criminals are placing a legitimate ad banner on top of the warning message via an iframe. The trick is to make the ad invisible by setting its opacity to zero. So, each time a user clicks anywhere on the legitimate message, he or she clicks also on the hidden ad.

An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, Valve introduced a new "trade hold" system that should prevent scammers from stealing items from Steam users' hijacked account, or at least minimize the occurrence of such incidents. Anyone using the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator to confirm trades is able to continue trading as always. Users who haven't enabled it, or can't, can still trade, but they'll have to wait up to 3 days for the trade to go through. The system was, understandably, not welcome by some users, and it didn't take long for scammers to take advantage of this discontent.

An anonymous reader writes with a report at The Stack that: eFast Browser, a new malicious adware which disguises itself as Google Chrome, has hijacked internet users' systems in an apparent effort to serve its own ads and harvest user activity to sell to third-party advertisers. It is able to mirror the aesthetics of Chrome as it uses the same source code, available across the open-source project Chromium. Once installed, eFast places ads across existing web pages, linking to third-party e-commerce sites or other malicious platforms.

An anonymous reader writes: A new flaw has been discovered in the latest version of OS X which allows hackers to install malware and adware onto a Mac without the need for any system passwords, researchers say. The serious zero-day vulnerability was first identified last week and results from a modified error-logging feature in OS X Yosemite which hackers are able to exploit to create files with root privileges. The flaw is currently found in the 'fully patched' OS X 10.10.4, but is not in the newest 10.11 El Capitan beta – suggesting that Apple developers were aware of the issue and are testing a fix.

vivaoporto notes a report that a group of hackers have used online ad networks to distribute malware over several of Yahoo's websites. The attack began on Tuesday, July 28, and was shut down on Monday, August 3. It was targeted at Yahoo's sports, finance, gaming, and news-related sites. Security firm Malwarebytes says the hackers exploited a Flash vulnerability to redirect users to the Angler Exploit Kit. "Attacks on advertising networks have been on the rise ... researchers say. Hackers are able to use the advertising networks themselves, built for targeting specific demographics of Internet users, to find vulnerable machines. While Yahoo acknowledged the attack, the company said that it was not nearly as big as Malwarebytes had portrayed it to be."

An anonymous reader writes: If you have a cracked or pirated version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) product the company has debuted an Amnesty program for you. Venturebeat reports: "If you pirated Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, purchased a counterfeit version of the software, or are having problems with your key in general, the company is offering a free replacement key." CEO Marcin Kleczynski explained the program and his statement reads in part: "When I started Malwarebytes, I absolutely had no idea how successful we would be today. I am extremely grateful for all of the support from everyone and how fast we’ve grown. That being said, I picked a very insecure license key algorithm and as such, generating a pirated key was, and is, very simple.

The problem with pirated keys is that they may collide with a legitimate key just by the sheer numbers. For example, Larry may generate a pirated key that matches the exact key that I already bought. Yes, this is silly, and yes, this is literally the first thing a professional software company thinks of when building license key generation, but when you think you’re building a product for just a few people you don’t hash out these details.

Now we’ve grown up, and we’ve got a new licensing system that we’ve rolled out in stages. The only problem is that we have millions of users that we’ve sold keys to, or a reseller has sold keys to, or we’ve given out keys to without keeping track. It is a mess, and you as a consumer have every right to be upset.

Adam Kujawa is the lead person on the Malwarebytes Malware Intelligence Team, but he's not here to sell software. In fact, he says that buying this or that software package is not a magic bullet that will stop all attacks on your systems. Instead, he stresses coworker education. Repeatedly. Adam says phishing and other social engineering schemes are now the main way attackers get access to your company's information goodies. Hacking your firewall? Far less likely than it used to be, not only because firewalls are more sophisticated than ever, but also because even the least computer-hip managers know they should have one.

jones_supa writes While routinely checking the latest exploited websites, Malwarebytes came across a strange infection pattern that seemed to start from the official site of British chef Jamie Oliver. Contrary to most web-borne exploits we see lately, this one was not the result of malicious advertising but rather carefully placed malicious JavaScript injection in the site itself. This, in turn, has been used to serve visitors a delicious meal consisting an exploit kit downloading the Dorkbot trojan. Malwarebytes has contacted the administrators immediately upon discovery of this infection.

wabrandsma (2551008) writes with this excerpt from The Verge: Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google's DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying "our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down."

hypnosec writes "Bitcoin miners are being integrated with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications. These miners surreptitiously carry out Bitcoin mining operations on the user's system consuming valuable CPU time without explicitly asking for user's consent. Malwarebytes, the company which found evidence of these miners, first came across such an instance of a Bitcoin miner when one of the users of its software requested for assistance on November 22 through a forum post. The user revealed that 'jh1d.exe' was taking up over 50 percent of the CPU resource and even after manual deletion the executable was re-appearing. Malwarebytes dug deeper into this and found traces of a miner 'jhProtominer,' a popular mining software that runs via the command line". However, it seems that the company behind the application has a specific clause 3 in EULA that talks about mathematical calculations similar to Bitcoin mining operation. This means that the company behind the software can and will install Bitcoin miners and use system resources to perform operations as required to mine Bitcoins and keep the rewards for themselves."

hypnosec writes "Bitcoin miners are being integrated with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications. These miners surreptitiously carry out Bitcoin mining operations on the user's system consuming valuable CPU time without explicitly asking for user's consent. Malwarebytes, the company which found evidence of these miners, first came across such an instance of a Bitcoin miner when one of the users of its software requested for assistance on November 22 through a forum post. The user revealed that 'jh1d.exe' was taking up over 50 percent of the CPU resource and even after manual deletion the executable was re-appearing. Malwarebytes dug deeper into this and found traces of a miner 'jhProtominer,' a popular mining software that runs via the command line". However, it seems that the company behind the application has a specific clause 3 in EULA that talks about mathematical calculations similar to Bitcoin mining operation. This means that the company behind the software can and will install Bitcoin miners and use system resources to perform operations as required to mine Bitcoins and keep the rewards for themselves."

An anonymous reader writes "A new piece of malware is targeting OS X to extort money from victims by accusing them of illegally accessing pornography. Ransomware typically uses claims of breaking the law and names law enforcement (such as the CIA or FBI) to scare victims, but it is usually aimed at Windows users, not Mac users. The security firm Malwarebytes first spotted this latest threat, noting that criminals have ported the ransomware scheme to OS X and are even exploiting a Safari-specific feature. The ransomware page in question gets pushed onto unsuspecting users browsing high-trafficked sites as well as when searching for popular keywords."

An anonymous reader writes "A new piece of malware is targeting OS X to extort money from victims by accusing them of illegally accessing pornography. Ransomware typically uses claims of breaking the law and names law enforcement (such as the CIA or FBI) to scare victims, but it is usually aimed at Windows users, not Mac users. The security firm Malwarebytes first spotted this latest threat, noting that criminals have ported the ransomware scheme to OS X and are even exploiting a Safari-specific feature. The ransomware page in question gets pushed onto unsuspecting users browsing high-trafficked sites as well as when searching for popular keywords."

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton says "Using FTP to administer a website is insecure -- but not for the reasons that you probably think. You yourself can stop using FTP any time you want, but how do we change the landscape Net-wide, to reduce the number of breakins using stolen FTP credentials?" You know what to click on if you want to read the rest.

On July 1st I found that one of my less important websites, hosted on a low-cost shared Web hosting service, had been broken into. A friend emailed me to say that the site was showing up in Google's search results with the Google "This site may harm your computer" warning listed next to it. I found that on one of the pages, about 1,500 HTML script tags had been inserted, loading JavaScript files from pseudo-random Russian hostnames like "www.chk06.ru" and "www.errghr.ru", none of which are currently resolving. Usually, when such script tags are maliciously inserted into a page on a website, the script tags attempt to install spyware on the machines of people who visit the site.

I immediately replaced the infected file on the website with the backed-up clean copy from my machine, and changed the password on the website in case the attacker had gotten in by using the old one. (The original file with the script tags inserted is here if you want to examine it, but use with caution -- if the .ru hostnames in the script tags start resolving again, then opening the file could cause the JavaScript on the pages to be loaded, which might infect your machine.) Then I started investigating (a) how this probably happened; (b) whether future similar attacks could be prevented, by changing some defaults in the way that hosting accounts are set up; and (c) whether the incentives for hosting providers are such that these changes are likely to happen by themselves, or whether it will require some third-party advocacy to change what we think of as "best practices".

Denis Sinegubko, the webmaster of Unmask Parasites, a free service that scans websites on demand for signs of break-ins, says:

The majority of web site compromises happen because of:

1. Stolen FTP credentials. Spyware on webmasters' computers: key-loggers, traffic sniffers (FTP protocol sends username/password as plain text), trojans that steal credentials from various programs' configuration files (FTP clients, DreamWeaver, etc).
2. Security holes in popular web software: CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc), Forums (phpBB, vBulletin, Simple Machines, etc), Blogs (WordPress). Once a vulnerability discovered, hackers configure their automated tools to search the web for websites running vulnerable versions of the software and exploit them. This can be done easily and at almost no cost when they have an army of zombie computers.
3. Security hole in "in-house" web software. Many novice (and even many experienced) web developers don't properly sanitize user input making various attacks possible (SQL injections, XSS, etc)
4. Poor security practices (Something that should be manually configured by site/server admins and cannot be fixed with automated security updates): Weak passwords, open ports, insufficiently strict permissions for limited accounts, files and directories with world write permissions, etc.

I didn't have any third-party web software or custom-made software installed on the PublicEditorMyAss.com site, the password was a seven-letter meaningless mix of letters and numbers, and I didn't have permission to change most of the things like open ports and file permissions. That left the possibility of stolen FTP credentials. This is in fact what Sinegubko says is the most common cause of such break-ins:

I guess 90% of attacks use stolen FTP credentials this year. Check this Google's graph that shows the top 10 malware sites as counted by the number of compromised web sites that referenced it:
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2009/06/top-10-malware-sites.html

I reviewed 4 most widespread of them (Gumblar, Martuz, Goooogleadsense, Googleanalytlcs). All four used stolen FTP credential to penetrate web sites and upload malicious content. The chances are the rest used this vector too.

When the PublicEditorMyAss.com site was set up, the default setting was for pages to be edited over FTP. Even though FTP sends and receives passwords without encrypting them (in contrast with alternatives like SFTP or "secure FTP", which encrypts passwords), for a long time I had assumed that this was not a major security problem, because in order for an attacker to intercept the passwords in transit, they would have to control a machine somewhere on the path between my home computer and the PublicEditorMyAss.com server. I figured this wasn't worth worrying about, because it was much more likely that an attacker would attempt to steal the password by installing spyware on my home computer. And if an attacker managed to do that, then I assumed that the risk of passwords being stolen by spyware was about the same whether I used FTP or SFTP -- because either way, the spyware could just steal my password by reading it out of a configuration file where the password was stored. (Even though FTP and SFTP programs both store passwords in an encrypted format, the programs have to be able to decrypt the passwords in order to use them whenever the user wants to open a connection. So the spyware could just mimic whatever steps the client programs use to decrypt the stored passwords, in order to steal one of my passwords stored in a file.) So, I assumed it made no difference whether I used FTP or SFTP.

But according to what Sinegubko told me, this reasoning was probably wrong. The problem is that even though spyware installed on your machine could read passwords that are stored in configuration files, it would be a lot of work to write a spyware program that could do this, because every FTP program and SFTP program stores passwords according to a different algorithm. It's much simpler for spyware to simply watch the traffic sent and received from your machine, so that any unencrypted passwords will be spotted:

[Passwords can be stolen by] sniffers that read all TCP traffic on local computers. Like personal firewalls but malicious. They can easily intercept FTP credentials since they are sent as a plain text.

Sinegubko describes how one of his contacts obtained evidence that a common spyware program was doing exactly this:

One of them even infected a spare WinXP computer (with Gumblar) to test the consequences. On the infected computer he created a new account in a popular FTP client and saved it. The server address was correct (his server) and the username/password pair was not valid. A few hours later in FTP logs, he discovered login attempts that used that invalid username/password pair from a Singapore IP, then from a Florida IP, the some other country's IP. Apparently the FTP credentials were somehow stolen from that infected computer.

I know of only two instances where I've ever definitely been infected with spyware. I don't do stupid things like downloading and running strange programs from third-party sites, so I think both infections were probably caused by a site exploiting a security hole in Internet Explorer, or in a plug-in like Adobe Acrobat or the Flash player. Both times, once I noticed I was infected, I got rid of the infection with Malwarebytes, but I don't know how much damage the spyware did in the meantime.

So this was a case where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. If I had known nothing about Internet architecture, and someone told me "FTP is less secure than SFTP," I would have found a way to switch to administering the site via SFTP. But because I knew that the main reason FTP was considered "insecure" was because it transmitted passwords unencrypted, but I also knew that most of of the machines relaying those passwords in transit were secure and trustworthy, I thought it didn't matter. Now it seems that is probably how my password got compromised after all.

In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching:

1. Go to the "Hosting" menu and pick "My Hosting Account."
2. Next to the name of your website, pick "Manage Account." This will open the Hosting Control Center.
3. In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the "Settings" options.
4. In the "Settings" control panel, click the "SSH" icon.
5. You will see a page saying "SSH is not set up", and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website.
6. You will then see a page which says:

   Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change
   Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours.

In fact, even if only one step were required to switch, most users probably wouldn't change from the default setting to use FTP, due to the eternal, unchangeable fact that most people do not change their default settings, ever. (What percent of users ever change the default set of toolbars that are displayed at the top of their Web browser window?)

If more Web hosting companies made SFTP the default, then the number of websites that were compromised by stolen login credentials, would probably go down. Spyware authors might start to make their programs smarter at that point, enabling them to read the passwords stored by popular FTP and SFTP programs, so that it would make no difference whether the passwords were transmitted in the clear or not. However, this would be harder for spyware authors to do correctly, so it would at least raise the bar for a successful malware attack, and the number of compromised websites would be reduced.

Unfortunately, Web hosting companies don't have much incentive to make users switch to the more secure SFTP protocol. This isn't necessarily true of all security risks; sometimes the hosting company has a strong incentive to pass on the right wisdom (and select the right default settings) for their customers. From the hosting company's point of view, you could divide risks into three categories:

• Risks where the hosting company pays a large part of the price for a customer's machine being compromised. For example, if a cyber-criminal takes over a customer's machine and uses it to launch a denial-of-service attack by sending it a flood of traffic, the hosting company will see that traffic spike on their network. The hosting company has the most incentive to help prevent these types of attacks.

• Risks where the hosting company doesn't directly pay a price for the customer's machine being compromised, but they may have to deal with complaints sent in by third parties. For example, a customer's website could get broken into, and script tags could be inserted into the pages that cause visitors' machines to be infected with spyware. Those visitors might complain to the webmaster of the infected site, or they might complain to the hosting company, which then forwards the complaint to the webmaster. The hosting company may have to provide a few minutes of tech support to the customer, advising them to change their password and scan their own machine for spyware, but they probably won't incur any other material costs.

• Risks where neither the hosting company nor the customer pays a price for the machine being infected, but the price is paid by "Internet users as a whole." The only attack that I can think of in this category, is an attack where a cyber-criminal inserts key words into your web page and links them to his site, in order to increase his Google ranking for searches for those key words. Neither the website owner, nor any visitors to the website, are victimized directly; the harm being done is that the quality of Google search results is reduced for everybody. The only reports of the attack would probably come from "good Samaritan" Web surfers, who tell the hosting company or the webmaster that one of their pages has been vandalized.

When a customer's FTP credentials are stolen, the price paid by the hosting company lies somewhere in the middle. An attacker who stole my current PublicEditorMyAss.com credentials would only be able to deface the content on the site, but they wouldn't be able to launch an attack against a third-party network (my PublicEditorMyAss.com hosting account doesn't have the ability to initiate an outgoing connection to a third-party site).

Weighing in the other direction are the costs of switching to SFTP. If existing customers are forcibly switched over, phone lines will be clogged by customers wanting to know why their old method of logging in to their site has suddenly stopped working. A better choice would be to allow existing customers to stay with FTP while making SFTP the default for new customers. But there is a time and money cost of changing anything, even a default setting.

So GoDaddy doesn't have much incentive to make SFTP their new default. Indeed, I've used many different shared hosting companies before I started running proxies exclusively on dedicated servers, and none of the shared hosting companies ever used anything but FTP as the default method for customers to administer their websites. So who can blame them? They're not making the choice that makes the most sense for their customers or for Internet security as a whole, they're making the choice that makes the most sense in terms of costs and benefits for themselves, and I'm not being judgmental about that. We shouldn't expect most companies to ever behave in any other way.

That's why I think that glib "solutions" to security problems, like "Everybody install anti-virus software", or "Everybody stop using Windows", aren't helpful, because regardless of whether these ideas would work if everybody actually followed them, the fact is that most people won't. The problems have to be addressed in terms of changing incentives for the choices people make.

What's an idea for reducing the risks of FTP credentials stolen by malware, that addresses the incentives problem? Maybe give tax breaks to Web hosting companies that set up customer accounts to use SFTP instead of FTP by default? Or ask more computer vendors to include a desktop link to pre-installed SFTP software, so that when Web hosting companies present options to their customers, it's easier for users to choose the SFTP option since they have a client already installed? (I was tempted to recommend that Microsoft include a universal SFTP client pre-installed in Windows with a prominent desktop link, but the problem with that is that if almost everybody used the same SFTP client, malware authors would have greater incentive to reverse-engineer the algorithm that the client used to store saved passwords -- and then passwords would be just as easily accessible to spyware, as if the user were using FTP all along. So a good mix of SFTP clients is safer for this purpose.)

Since the difference between SFTP and FTP usually only matters in cases where a customer's machine has been infected with malware, obviously the best solution is to avoid malware altogether, but that's much harder problem to solve, as long as malware authors can keep finding security holes in Internet Explorer and other popular programs. Making SFTP the new standard for Web hosting accounts is something that we know how to do, right now. The incentives aren't currently right for Web hosting companies to make it happen. But there may be ways to change that, and I'll bet some people can think of better ideas than the ones I've suggested. I'm just saying that the incentives problem is where attention should be focused.