Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Blogger System Sites Used for Phishing

Posted by Zonk on from the careful-who-you-visit dept.

jimbojw writes "In a recent security advisory Fortinet is reporting that due to Blogger's popularity, hackers have started to embed malicious scripts on some blogs. 'These scripts have shown up on hundreds of Blogger.com sites. In some cases, a variant of the Stration mass mailer is responsible for directing traffic to the Blogger.com sites.' CNET reports on the situation, quoting an unnamed Google representative as saying 'These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service. We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted.' The blogs in question use meta or JavaScript redirection to push traffic to a phishing or malware site. Links to the blogs are subsequently mass-mailed by infected visitors — typically via worms in the Stration family. We can only hope that this will not cause Google to remove Blogger.com's templating engine — which is both a source of its strength, and a potential liability as illustrated by these recent attacks."

13 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Good old javascript by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This stuff just isn't ever going to be fixed. Some folks may not like it, but with all these silly problems, AJAX is the new MS Windows of the 21st century.

    No, that's not a troll. Just an observation that many want to cover up.

  2. Phishing with Worms? by ehaggis · · Score: 5, Funny

    That seems about right.

    --
    One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
  3. SPAM by mastershake_phd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not to mention blogs set up just to be filled with spam. Google must give these popular sites some leeway, before delisting them.

    --
    Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
  4. What's Next? by andrewd18 · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's next, hacking a release server and modifying tarballs so blog updaters everywhere become vulnerable? Oh, wait...

  5. They did what? by voice_of_all_reason · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These sites allow you to include script? What were they thinking?

    Anybody home, McFly?

    1. Re:They did what? by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Informative

      Lots of people have legitimate uses for Jscript on the website, AND google's own adwords relies on jScript to work.

      Honestly all they need to do is make the template engine scrub any script that does redirects or nasty tricks like opening popups on load.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    2. Re:They did what? by maxume · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OnMouseOver was Web 1.5. The :hover pseudo-class is Web 2.0.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    3. Re:They did what? by Josef+Meixner · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Honestly all they need to do is make the template engine scrub any script that does redirects or nasty tricks like opening popups on load.

      If you find a way to do that, you will also have solved the halting-problem, in other words, that is nearly impossible to do.

      There is only one way which might be safe, supply finished javascript functions to the users to use and make it impossible to define new functions. Even that might be dangerous.

    4. Re:They did what? by evought · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In relatively early versions of TCL, they had the ability to create a sub-interpreter. The controlling interpreter could then populate the sub-interpreter with whatever commands and environment were deemed safe and create limited connections between the interpreters. Scripts running in the sub-interpreter simply did not have access to anything else. We used this to execute user scripts and configuration files in secure setups where anything coming in from the outside could be considered suspect. This could easily be done with javascript where untrusted pages/scripts would run in a limited sandbox. It was not terribly inefficient, either (against the interpreter overhead) and could even be nested. The page itself could even request such treatment, or an otherwise trusted page could request it for certain blocks of code. This pushes the actual security responsibility to the interpreter where it arguably belongs anyway. The client could decide it doesn't like the whole page and run it all in a sandbox.

      Overall, I think javascript is much overused and abused for what should be simple content.

    5. Re:They did what? by klenwell · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Agreed, but the ability to fully edit the source does make Blogger more fun than a lot of other 2.0 sites and I'd hate to see it go away.

      Interestingly, both Blogger and Googlepages are now Google services. Blogger is obviously meant for blogging and Googlepages for setting up common web pages, but Googlepages is a headache and Blogger offers the ability to edit the source. So if I need to set up a random web page on the web and I want it to look like I want it to look (and not have ads plastered all over it), I'll use Blogger. I don't know anywhere else on the web where I can do this.

      --
      Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
  6. That's a STRENGTH? by ScentCone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A template that allows people to slap a meta redirect into the header is strength that they hope Google will still respect? If you want to play those games, host your own site. The point of these blog-o-spaces is to let people do the easy stuff, not monkey with redirection. On the other hand, I can see how it might take, oh... at least 10 minutes to write a filter that would block the meta redirects on their side of things. That is a lot to ask, even in the face of being Google-blacked.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  7. If this hasn't already been named... by Flabio · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...can we call it "phlogging"?

  8. Been there. by Shadyman · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've had numerous attacks against my site, which of course don't work because I don't allow script tags, but I've reported the target sites to their respective webhosts and registrars, and had at least a few blocked/cancelled/warned/etc. Most registrars and webhosts are more than happy to put these sites out of their misery.