Slashdot Mirror
Growth of the Underground Cybercrime Economy
AC50 writes "According to research from Trend Micro's TrendLabs compromised Web sites are gaining in importance on malicious sites created specifically by cyber-criminals. The research debunks the conventional wisdom about not visiting questionable sites, because even trusted Web sites such as those belonging to Fortune 500 companies, schools, and government organizations can serve forth malware."
Any site serving up adverts is potentially sering up malware. Durr.....
... use it together with adblocker and a good antivirus package and your web experience will be safe and much faster.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
> [...] can serve forth malware
Serve Forth malware from a website? I'd be more concerned about JavaScript malware and the like.
"And there be unix which have made themselves unix for the kingdom of heaven's sake." - Matt. 19:12
Slashdot is safe. It's the only site I visit. Make sure not to open the articles. You never know.
What?
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:.edu+viagra .gov
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:.gov+viagra
Only two pwned sites in the top 10 for
It'd be ironic if idtheft.utah.gov was handing out malware.
Replace viagra with other spamwords & you'll get more of the same
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In the end, the majority of security problems lies with the user. We need better computer security education in schools and instill a healthy sense of paranoia in the youth.
Do we really need Trend Micro's PC-cillin?
Microsoft needs to get their new service pack out the door. No, I don't mean Vista SP1. Microsoft needs to get XP SP3 out. So many people think Windows Update is some silly annoyance that Microsoft threw in there for who knows what. They never heed the requests to install updates and reboot, since that takes so long. Then when their machine slows to a crawl with adware, they ask us to fix them. And in other cases, their computers join a botnet and spam us all.
XP SP3, on the other hand, can have marketing support behind it. Articles can talk about it and how to install it, and people won't get so annoyed at a one-time installation. XP SP3 includes fixes for the still-quite-popular ADODB.Stream and animated cursor exploits, and at this point, finding browser exploits is getting into diminishing returns. Now that Microsoft cares, Windows is having its code audited much more thoroughly than when XP SP2 was made.
Service packs also give Microsoft an opportunity to release fixes for security holes found internally, since service packs are so different from the previous version. If they patched holes quickly like Firefox does with incremental patches, they'd be revealing those holes to attackers armed with machine code diff programs.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The research debunks the conventional wisdom about not visiting questionable sites, because even trusted Web sites such as those belonging to Fortune 500 companies, schools, and government organizations can serve forth malware
I still believe you're still more likely to get malware on dodgy sites. As worded in the summary, this sounds like an excuse someone came up with to justify their penchant to troll for pr0n, war3z and mp3z.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
We have a list of major sites being exploited by active phishing scams, which we update every three hours. There are 56 sites on the list right now. Most sites don't stay on the list too long, but we still have 14 that have been on the list since last year. Most of them are DSL service providers with compromised machines they haven't kicked off. Some providers are proactive about this, and some aren't. Then there are a few compromised sites that just have no clue about how to fix their problem. One such site is the teacher web space for a school district.
By, well, nagging, we've been able to get the big players to fix their problems. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Dell were all on the list at one point, but they've all tightened up their systems.
The points we make with this list are that 1) the number of major sites involved is small, and 2) blacklisting at the second level domain level causes acceptable levels of collateral damage. So go ahead, blacklist the whole second level domain in your phishing filters. Think of it as a way to encourage sites to clean up their act. Or as a way to find out where to apply the clue stick.
This list is about "major" sites, ones in Open Directory (1.7 million sites.) The issue there is with attackers trying to steal the credibility of the major site. At the other end of the scale, any domain less than a few weeks old probably isn't worth connecting to. Or at least it should be read with all executable content disabled, including HTML email. Also, any link with more than one redirect probably shouldn't be followed.
It's easier to filter out the attackers if you're willing to filter out the bottom-feeders as well. But that's another story.
Thank you for commenting on slashdot! LOL! You'd love the zany TOTALLY NUDE shots from my webcam! All you have to do is CLICK MY LINK and you will see me totally exposed! This is not a hack or virus or any of that, I am just trying to increase my exposure (if you know what I mean) in !script=LOCAL_CITY!@user! so I thought I would hit you up personally, since you seem soooo kewl! I luv yer pix and maybe we can get a little more personal if you Czech out my pix on my sight. XOXOXO 3 --Bubbles.
FairTax baby!
Firstly, everyone in this market puts out these sort of research reports - monthly, quarterly, annually, it varies - partly to inform and educate, but mostly for the PR value. Of course everyone sees much the same threat environment, so they're all much of a muchness, PR spin notwithstanding. I don't see my employers' annual threat survey on the Slashdot front page; hmmmm, maybe I should submit it? Or maybe not...
Secondly - "serve forth" PUH-leassseee... just reminds me of the great UK rapper Silver Bullet and his popular number, "Bring Forth the Guillotine!" from 89. Oh hey, look, anti-virus software... silver bullet... myth... hmmmm.
A trustworthy website will remove malware after the first complaint and will give subsequent visitors a warning and a tool to remove the malware in question. There is still a risk, however the chance of encountering malware on a bank website is significantly less than 100% versus purposely malicious domains and the owner is spending effort to protect you rather than infect you.
Or you could just install all updates for your favorite OS or a 3rd party browser and virtually eliminate the chance of unintentionally installing a malware executable. Even IE7 is positively fascist when it comes to downloads and plugins these days.
Kind of hard to progress also when you wake up some morning and find your life savings have been transferred to some dodgy account in Russia. It isn't fleeing in terror, it's putting a hold on things until developers realise that security is as important as functionality.
There are a finite number of exploitable bugs in Windows XP for very large values of finite.
I'm guessing you'd have to download the code and check it before you can know if it's actually safe.. depending on your definition of 'safe' of course.
which is totally what she said
I've been beating the drum about Internet Explorer and its deliberate malware distribution features like ActiveX for years. Over 10 years, in fact, since it was 1997 when Microsoft introduced Active Desktop...
When people tell me "oh yes, I use Internet Explorer, but I only visit well known websites I can trust" I have been able in some cases to convince them that thanks to forums and other sources of third party content even "trusted" websites can source malware.
Despite what Trend Micro suggests, the best approach to security is still taking proper care with the software you use. They talk about attacks on embedded devices like cellphones, but note that they're primarily talking about their potential as backdoors for infected files, not about their embedded browsers being attacked directly. Antivirus companies want antivirus software installed on everything... that's how they make money... but until they ship software that is purely a scanner and doesn't patch the OS you're more likely to have the AV software than any virus damage your PDA, cellphone, or non-Windows PC.
But taking care with the software you use DOESN'T mean only using bad software on good websites, but not using bad software at all. The best antivirus, then, is to avoid using software that deliberately includes backdoors to allow automatic installation and execution of unsandboxed code from websites. The poster boy for this insane design is, of course, Internet Explorer, which is actually built around this model and were Microsoft to fix it they would have to break a lot of working products. But there are similar design flaws, albeit ones not so automatically easy to exploit, in other browsers... for example Firefox and Safari will happily install code for you if the code is wrapped up in the appropriate package. In Firefox that package is the XPI... and I would recommend keeping the list of whitelisted sites in Firefox empty at all times. In Safari that package is the Dashboard widget, and the option 'Open "Safe" Files after downloading' which is now (thankfully) off by default in new installs (though it doesn't prevent Dashboard widgets from being installed).
And now Microsoft is pushing a cross-platform infection vector under the name Silverlight, and there's an open-source clone of it by the name "Moonlight" under development. Some days I despair, truly.
And no number of "I'm about to do something stupid, is this OK?" dialog boxes are good enough. After 20 years as a system administrator, the last several years of which were spent fighting an increasingly frustrating battle against malware riding on this misfeature of Microsoft's security model, I can only recall one time where someone was *twice* convinced to download and explicitly run an infected file from the shell... but I've repeatedly had people come to me saying "Peter... I clicked on the wrong button again, and my computer's acting funny".
If you're a software developer, and you find yourself adding an "I'm about to do something stupid" dialog... please reconsider whether it's actually necessary. It almost never is. People really would rather explicitly download and install a plugin, for example, than have the browser pop up annoying messages all the time. Really.
When you write: think twice before visiting a site which you're not sure of. Especially if you browse with internet exploder..
Surely you mean think twice before [...] you browse with internet exploder..
Juice is a community site. Google Altiris SVS for better information.
No this isn't virtual memory.... it is a virtual machine. Memory and CPU registers are supposed to be separated and each process is supposed to be divided so they can't directly access each other but rather need to route through the operating system in order to send information to each other. Only in practice this doesn't always happen.
And this is a problem with VMWare as much any other sort of processor division. The main problems was that once the virtual machines were set up for each process in Windows, all sorts of holes were punched into the environment for message passing and other issues that allowed for inter-process communications. And *THAT* is where the security holes came into play.
All VMWare and other similar software provides is another level of abstraction... and some initial security that Windows supposedly provided originally but then ignored with a drive to provide inter-process actions. The same thing can happen with Virtual Machines... and between networked computers. Just that it is another level of abstraction moving up the food chain.