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How VeriSign Could Stop Drive-By Downloads
emcron writes "Ben Edelman has been doing great forensic work looking at spyware, adware, and malware. His latest piece, How VeriSign Could Stop Drive-By Downloads, turns the harsh light of public scrutiny on VeriSign's grubby practices in issuing digital certificates to vendors who try to install spyware by tricking users into clicking 'yes' with low-down dirty lying dialog boxes. Now, Ben wants VeriSign to clean up its act: it should refuse to issue certificates to companies that use obviously fake names (such as "CLICK YES TO CONTINUE") or that use those certificates to deceive consumers."
The beauty of certificates is, you decide who you trust. If you object to VeriSign's practice of issuing certificates to spyware/adware makers, simply don't choose to trust VeriSign's root certificate. This is only a temporary measure, I guess.
And since the purpose of opportunistic companies like Verisign, who's keys are no better than anyone else's, is to make as much doe ray me as fast as possible, why are they going to do this?
Mumia Abu-Jamal is *laughably guilty*. Check the evidence.
I can't deny that VeriSign should be doing a better job with stuff like this, but I certainly don't believe in the claim that by taking their certs away that drive-by downloads will cuddenly stop.
The real problem is the fact that nobody bothers to read the window that has just popped up in front of them. I'm guilty of this myself, there have been times I've not even recognized a problem with certs on my own servers the first few times clicking through.
My saving grace is that I never ever click an OK or YES button unless I'm expecting one. That simple rule has kept me from ever having anything installed using this method. The problem is that not everyone understands that they should not agree to every popup window they see. It's not going to matter if it claims to be authorized by God himself; if it has a YES/NO/CANCEL option and the user is not security-aware the person will probably say yes. I think educating people would be more effetive than trying to get the CAs to revoke the certificates.
I'm sure there will be plenty of the "Use FireFox, Problem Solved!" comments as well. I have experienced, rarely, where a drive-by site is impossible to say "no" to when under Firefox and eventually crashed the browser but IE under SP2 handled itself very well on the same page.
After the whole debacle with the DNS somehow i don't see Verisign prioritize ethics over profit any time soon
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Perhaps, one day after Drive-By Downloads are stopped, a new era could emerge...
A time in which east-side nerds could live side by side with west-side nerds.
I have a dream...
Sigs are for the weak.
I DARE YOU TO CLICK YES
we were also considering
CLICK YES YOU MORON
OMG, WERE YOU SERIOUSLY GOING TO CLICK NO
and
THIS IS SO COOL, YOU GOTTA SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU CLICK YES
Reminds me of a comment on politics which also appeared on /. some time ago.
It was proposed to change one's name to None Of The Above and run for presidency.
Come on! Verisign's whole business model is to sell as many certificates as it can - it's simply not in their interests to show scruples like that. Verisign have the MicroSoft seal of approval, so for the average desktop user that makes their reputation beyond suspicion, so they have nothing to lose.
My Sister-in-law runs redhat 9 (because I installed the system)
She tells me that she often goes to sites which offer games which she (or her son) would like to run. Most of the time they don't work either because they need java or activex, or because they are just broken
Either way it is my fault for giving her a PC which doesn't do all these things
You and I have reasonable expectations about technology. The person in the street has different expectations and they drive the market
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Unchecking it prevents IE from offering to download IE language packs when you visit a website you cannot view with currently installed languages. Nothing more. If you have all the languages you can read installed already, then you probably won't want this checked.
From what I have seen, I believe that the employees at Verisign are "Clicking yes to continue" when approving certificate requests. Or someone mistakenly clicked the "Yes to All" button.
...is to trust everyone.
They have to.
Every site that they visit will have embedded Flash, embedded Java, embedded QuickTime, embedded Real, embedded midi (FFS!).
They are taught on their first few days to trust everyone, and that nothing that they want to achieve can be done without trusting that the site is legit in asking you to download and install stuff.
And when they speak to their geek friends (or friends of their kids), they get told dismissively and condescendingly that YES, they must install to see the site properly, to do what they want. You can bet that they won't ask a second time!
Is it really a surprise then, that we have a problem later with dumb users downloading spyware, adware, and malware in general?
The problem could be much alleviated by simply pre-installing all of the key technologies in advance.
Some Linux distros do this... my mother knew from the first moment she used Simply Mepis that she didn't need to download anything else... I told her this, and because nearly all of her sites worked (just not pogo.com) she hasn't downloaded anything else.
But you can't do this with Windows... because Windows gives you nothing, and certainly nothing from Apple, Real, Macromedia, Sun, etc... and then to compound it, Windows is an open playground for malware once downloaded.
If Windows RME were permitted to be shipped with not just alternatives and pre-configured competitor offerings for media, but also with common plugins for the web... and... maybe even Firefox to give choice... then this would do more to prevent malware spreading than Verisign being forced to change their practices.
Of course... hell would freeze over, pigs would fly, and the Bush would have an epiphany on social welfare before all of the above happened.
Obviously, nothing happened afterwards.
Obviosly 90% of the people posting in this discussion have no practical experience with this subject. The certificate in question is a code-signing certificate. Have you ever bought (or tried to buy) one of those from Verisign? I have and let me tell you--it is a royal pain in the ass. I can say with almost certainty that those certificates that are from a company called "CLICK YES TO CONTINUE" did not come from Verisign.
/. ignorance.
It took me nearly two weeks to track down all the paperwork to get my code signing certificate (authenticode). The process includes designating two contacts, faxing over several forms (including a valid county business license for the company name on the application) and a notorized agreement of indemification because they weren't able to do 3rd party identity validation on my company (they look your company name up in the white pages and call the number to make sure it exists and that you do indeed work there. My company wasn't in the phone book.) They also try to look you up in D&B. This all came after giving them the $500 for the certificate.
That being said, I don't see how anyone could get away with purchasing a certificate such as described in the article from Verisign--maybe Thawte or another. IMO Verisign is taking some flak here due to
> And when they speak to their geek friends (or
> friends of their kids), they get told dismissively
> and condescendingly that YES, they must install to > see the site properly, to do what they want. You
> can bet that they won't ask a second time!
Not this geek friend. I tell people not to trust anyone on the internet and to never download any crappy plugins as 90% of them will simply be used for serving up intrusive advertising. And if the site doesn't work without their plugins them go elsewhere.
After I've removed the first load of spyware and repeated the advice they usually listen. If not they don't get a second visit from me. I just point them to the internet and say "You're not interested in my advice so you can fix things yourself".
Sorry I've gone half tilt Amish on the idiots of the internet. If you can't get your message over to me using plain old HTML and static images you can stick your message up your arse.
The internet is not digital TV.
Personally I can't wait 'til someone invents some sort of uber bandwidth media-tastic bright & shiny "Hyper Net" (now with unbrakabul DRM (tm)). Then all the drongos can go and happily consume on it whilst leaving the rest of us with our "good old" internet.
Plugins ? I spit on you all.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
The other solution is to quit treating digital certificates as something to do with trust (the authorization-vs-authentication fallacy). Microsoft's stupid "security zones" model takes this blatant idiocy further than anyone, but all browsers have adopted some similar conceptual structure.
A certificate doesn't tell you anything about whether a web site is secure, trustable, or anything else. It simply provides a slightly better verification of identity.
You'd be surprised. Our company bought a product from UPS logistics that uses the Sun Java runtime but doesn't work in Firefox. (yes I'm serious). Turns out they have a bunch of IE only javascript that sends parameters to the applet, whithout the parameters it doesn't initalize. I dug around the system for like an hour trying to figure out what it was doing, but in the end just gave up. Lazy programmers will always bone you, no matter how portible something is supposed to be.
The point of certificates is to prevent impersonation of trusted sources by untrusted sources. Anyone can register a valid company name. Verisign considers proof of name a printed phone listing (they call you back at the published number) or a notarized copy of a business license.
So somebody seems to have registered a company name "Click YES to continue" in some state. It's probably a legal company name. I agree with the author that this is obviously deceptive practice, and Verisign should revoke the certificate revoked. In addition, we should be able to complain to Verisign about other companies violating the Verisign agreement.
I don't know what they do if the company name is a duplicate of another previously registered name.