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Scammers Bite Chrome Users With Forgotten 2014 Bug (betanews.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the burning-Chrome dept.

"Tech support scammers have started exploiting a two-year-old bug in Google Chrome to trick victims into believing their PC is infected with malware," reports security researcher Sophos. It begins by freezing the browser, BrianFagioli reports, sharing an article from Beta News: These bad guys pose as Microsoft tech support and display an in-browser message that says the user's computer is infected with "Virus Trojan.worm! 055BCCAC9FEC". To make matters worse, Google has apparently known about the exploit for more than two years and simply failed to patch it. "The bug was discovered in Chrome 35 in July 2014 in the history.pushState() HTML5 function, a way of adding web pages into the session history without actually loading the page in question. The developer who reported the issue published code showing how to add so many items into Chrome's history list that the browser would effectively freeze", says Sophos...

"Users can either close Chrome using the Task Manager or, in cases where the browser is using up so much processor power that Task Manager doesn't appear, by rebooting the computer. The chances of encountering this particular scam are small -- it's only been spotted on a single website -- but its existence underlines how small bugs that don't seem terribly important may nevertheless be abused by cybercriminals down the line."

7 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Its not rare. Its very common. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work in tech support for a local managed service provider in a small city. We have several dozen business clients in the region (we don't handle private users). We are not a large operation by any measure. We get at least 2 calls a week about someone's computer having a virus that turns out to be this. Most of the time it seems to come from websites that are typo-squatting. If we are seeing that volume of complaints it can't be rare.

    1. Re: Its not rare. Its very common. by raind · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was just about to say the same thing .this is been going on for months

      --
      Get up!
  2. Re: Why does that function even exist? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Specifically it's for sites or web apps that have changes to pages without navigating to a new URL so the back button will work as expected. Basically for JavaScript laden front ends the hipsters love that leak like crazy and use all your memory and CPU just for a couple tabs.

  3. Re: Why does that function even exist? by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Specifically it's for sites or web apps that have changes to pages without navigating to a new URL so the back button will work as expected.

    Like my.t-mobile.com . It's such an annoying practice... plus sites doing It often don't work correctly in some browsers.

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    #DeleteChrome
  4. Got bit by this 2-wks ago at latimes.com by bennet42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I normally browse using firefox with noscript and uMatrix, but occasionally when I want to view a video, I'll fire up Chrome and copy/paste the link there. Did that for an article at latimes.com two weeks ago and got served up some malware advertisement that did exactly this. I was impressed. You wouldn't expect that a reputable site like latimes.com would allow malvertizements, and you wouldn't expect that chrome would have an easily exploitable javascript vulnerability. Had to use process explorer to kill chrome.

    1. Re:Got bit by this 2-wks ago at latimes.com by aberglas · · Score: 2

      I personally saw this one too. Had to kill Chrome. Wondered what other damage it was doing

      The most important thing about a browser is how many features it has. The more the better. Real security would involve winding back HTML5 into something so simple that it could be understood and audited. Never going to happen. And we have come to accept that shipping insecure software and then patching as the bugs are found is the way software works. Nobody is ever upset that the bugs are shipped int the first place -- it is just a fact of our ever more complex lives.

      I think that we have to accept that when visit a web site we are executing their code and therefor need to just trust that they will not do anything to our computers.

  5. Re:Why does that function even exist? by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    How does it benefit the user to let websites push "visited" URLs into a browsers history? I expect my browser's history to only include sites I've actually visited.

    Easy - if you click a link on a page and it does an AJAX thing and load up the destination without actually changing the page URL. You see this in webmail - you click your mailbox and the URL doesn't change, but the email opens. Now, you may know to click the X that they put up to close ir, or a back button to go back to the index, but if you click the real browser Back button, what happens? If you're unlucky, it goes to the previous page you visited (or blank tab page).

    Using this function lets you pre-load the page into the Back button so if you use the back button, it does the Right Thing and actually goes back to the index as you expect.

    The best example of this is GMail - where you have 3 ways of getting back to the index from a message view - you click the arrow, you click the mailbox, OR you click the browser back button. (And the back button may not be physically clicking the button, but using a mapped keyboard or mouse button)

    It's because a lot of sites do AJAXy stuff that would otherwise break Back button functionality