Hijacked Web Traffic For Sale

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Hijacked Web Traffic For Sale

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 29, 2012 @07:50PM from the 1-crying-young-spying-young-viewer-for-sale dept.

mask.of.sanity writes "If you can't create valuable content to attract users to your site, Russian cyber criminals will sell them to you. A web store has been discovered that sells hacked traffic that has been redirected from legitimate sites. Sellers inject hidden iframes into popular web sites and redirect the traffic to a nominated domain. Buyers purchase the traffic from the store to direct to their sites and the sellers get paid."

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Uhm... by martin-boundary · 2012-01-29 20:14 · Score: 4, Informative

Isn't this what websites do all the time with ads, and Facebook and Google+ buttons? It's not like I personally agree to send my traffic to Facebook when the button shows up on a random webpage, and visiting all those ad servers incidentally just slows down my web browsing for no good reason.
1. Re:Uhm... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-29 20:48 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Isn't this what websites do all the time with ads, and Facebook and Google+ buttons? It's not like I personally agree to send my traffic to Facebook when the button shows up on a random webpage, and visiting all those ad servers incidentally just slows down my web browsing for no good reason.
  This is different. In this case, It looks like the browser is redirected to the to the seller's domain. The "buttons" you refer to are just AJAX requests in the background.
  what are you talking about? facebook "like" buttons are either scripts or iframes, and the script just adds an iframe after the fact, but in it all comes down to GET requests and cookies stealing information that do slow down browsing of sites. if you cannot see this perhaps it is time to get off dialup.
2. Re:Uhm... by BlackPignouf · 2012-01-29 21:46 · Score: 2
  
  http://lifehacker.com/5542041/block-sites-from-using-your-facebook-login-with-adblock-plus
3. Re:Uhm... by Pieroxy · 2012-01-29 21:56 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  ?
  You only "send your traffic" to facebook, if you choose to click on the link to Facebook.
  Aaaaand, congratulations! You don't know how the Web works.
  Whenever you see the "Like" facebook button, you browser has made several HTTP request to facebook and run facebook hosted scripts on your page. And if you're logged in to facebook on that computer, facebook has recorded the fact that YOU went to that page.
  All of that without clicking on the button, courtesy of the website owner.
  
  --
  Write boring code, not shiny code!
4. Re:Uhm... by trancemission · 2012-01-29 23:02 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  You only "send your traffic" to facebook, if you choose to click on the link to Facebook.
  ?
  
  Wrong. Many sites share information on their visitors to 3rd parties, this allows said 3rd parties to track and profile you. You do not have to click a link, it happens in the background.
  
  Use this to find out who the main players are: http://www.ghostery.com/
  
  Ghostery sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
  
  And obviously ad-block plus, NoScript at al...
  
  Facebook specific:
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-blocker/?src=userprofile
5. Re:Uhm... by kainosnous · 2012-01-29 23:42 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Very true. It's something that has bothered me for a while. I'd really rather not have Facebook and others tracking me all over the web, and yet, they usually do. Even while you're viewing this very page, there are icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google which must be loaded from their site. IIRC, some of those ToS won't allow you to use their logo, so it has to come from their site. Even the website has a copy of the image, you still need to use their site for stats and other nifty functionality. In modern sites, that is almost always done by client side JavaScript which makes users send traffic to their site. All of that can be bypassed, but I don't know anybody who does for long.
  I think that people would be truly shocked to find out how much information they are sending about themselves, and how many sites collect it that they are unaware of. Most of that comes because of an ignorance about how the web works. What makes it sad is that most of them don't care as long as they get to chat with friends on their Facebook page.</rant>
  
  --
  There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
6. Re:Uhm... by somersault · 2012-01-29 23:56 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Even while you're viewing this very page, there are icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google which must be loaded from their site
  Actually, those images are loaded from http://a.fsdn.com/sd/commentshareicons.png.
  Tinfoil hat fail.
  Yes, most of them don't care. I don't care either.
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
7. Re:Uhm... by ewanm89 · 2012-01-30 01:05 · Score: 2
  
  Worse still is google analytics, that one happens 100% hidden from the ordinary users view, no picture or anything.
8. Re:Uhm... by Maow · 2012-01-30 05:20 · Score: 2
  
  How about;
  static.ak.fbcdn.net
  apis.google.com
  platform.twitter.com
  and google-analytics.com ?
  Use Ghostery add-on (Firefox & Chromium), perhaps with RequestPolicy Firefox add-on.
  Unrelated but I can't stand browsing without EasyGestures add-on for Firefox...
This is getting ridiculous by gweihir · 2012-01-29 20:39 · Score: 2

It also shows the complete failure of law-enforcement when it comes to commercial hacking.

--
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
1. Re:This is getting ridiculous by gweihir · 2012-01-29 20:58 · Score: 2
  
  The only one I can be sure about is mine ;-)
  This is slashdot though, so I am fine with that.
  The rest looks a bit like moronic cops failing to catch moronic criminals defrauding moronic companies to deviate business from moronic customers. The complete human tragedy rolled into it. Reminds me a bit of of the movie "Fargo".
  
  --
  Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
2. Re:This is getting ridiculous by znrt · 2012-01-29 21:54 · Score: 2
  
  It also shows the complete failure of law-enforcement when it comes to commercial hacking.
  it also shows the braindeadness of site value assessment based on traffic.
OMG by goldaryn · 2012-01-29 20:54 · Score: 3, Funny

Today I learnt

1) There are hackers on the Internet

2) Foreign capitalists also engage in criminal activity

3) Noone cares about Australian click-throughs
Re:AAA: Anti-Ajax-Argument by andrew3 · 2012-01-29 21:13 · Score: 2

iFrames != AJAX. I'd say they probably never even used AJAX, only a simple JavaScript redirect.
Pay for bandwidth/hosting, AND for visitors by mehrotra.akash · 2012-01-29 21:51 · Score: 2

Whats the point?
Re:AAA: Anti-Ajax-Argument by Pieroxy · 2012-01-29 21:58 · Score: 3, Informative

You are correct. AJAX cannot be cross-domain.
There is however a catch, since a lots of libraries will allow you do do cross-domain "AJAX-like" request by adding a "SCRIPT" object to the page dynamically. You can't POST but you can GET fine with this method since the SCRIPT tag is cross domain.

--
Write boring code, not shiny code!
AJAX-like = JSONP by sakdoctor · 2012-01-29 22:40 · Score: 3, Informative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP
...and the correct way to do the same thing on modern (aka not fricking ancient) browsers...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Origin_Resource_Sharing
Re:I don't understand.... by MrAngryForNoReason · 2012-01-29 23:00 · Score: 3, Informative

Somebody please enlighten me on how this service works. If you are "injecting" inline frames that have a size of 0 width and 0 height, then how the heck does anybody click on it? I don't get it.
The iframe loads in a line of javascript which initiates a redirect to the target site. The user doesn't need to click on anything as the javascript will run automatically.
What this means in practice is that as soon as a user loads the page they will be redirected to the target site, probably so quickly that they don't realise. This is what makes it so dangerous as the user can be redirected to a page that is almost identical to the genuine one and then convinced to login to the site giving up their login or bank details etc.
Re:I don't understand.... by kainosnous · 2012-01-29 23:56 · Score: 2

Just because you, the end user, doesn't see something, doesn't mean that you aren't actively engaging it. Everytime you open a web page, your browser usually makes several requests to retrieve stylesheets, scripts, and every image on the page. There is nothing that requires those items to come from the site you think they do. If a rogue script is there, then it gets on your computer and likely has all the permission that you've allowed for the page you're on, possibly including cookie information. Also, a script could quietly auto-redirect you to a phishing page, etc.

--
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
Ancient news by Bob+Ince · 2012-01-30 00:56 · Score: 2

Not sure why this is suddenly news, the Russian iframe traffic hubs have been running for over a decade now.
The destination URLs are typically clickfraud, exploits, and iframes to other traffic redirectors.
The domain registrar mentioned in the article (DirectI) is notorious for high levels of abuse from the Russian-language sploit/AWM community.