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Not Just Equifax. Rival Site Transunion Served Malware Too -- and 1,000 More Sites (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Equifax isn't the only credit-reporting behemoth with a website redirecting visitors to fake Adobe Flash updates. A security researcher from AV provider Malwarebytes said transunioncentroamerica.com, a TransUnion site serving people in Central America, [was] also sending visitors to the fraudulent updates and other types of malicious pages... Malwarebytes security researcher Jerome Segura says he was able to repeatedly reproduce a similar chain of fraudulent redirects when he pointed his browser to the transunioncentroamerica.com site. On some occasions, the final link in the chain would push a fake Flash update. In other cases, it delivered an exploit kit that tried to infect computers with unpatched browsers or browser plugins... "This is not something users want to have," Segura told Ars...
Equifax on Thursday was quick to say that its systems were never compromised in the attacks. TransUnion said much the same thing. This is an important distinction in some respects because it means that the redirections weren't the result of attackers having access to restricted parts of either company's networks. At the same time, the incidents show that visitors to both sites remain much more vulnerable to malicious content than they should be.
Both sites hosted fireclick.js, an old script from a small web analytics company which pulls pages from sites like Akamai, SiteStats.info, and Ostats.net. "It appears that attackers have compromised the third-party library," writes BankInfoSecurity, adding that Malwarebytes estimates over a 1,000 more sites are using the same library.
Equifax on Thursday was quick to say that its systems were never compromised in the attacks. TransUnion said much the same thing. This is an important distinction in some respects because it means that the redirections weren't the result of attackers having access to restricted parts of either company's networks. At the same time, the incidents show that visitors to both sites remain much more vulnerable to malicious content than they should be.
Both sites hosted fireclick.js, an old script from a small web analytics company which pulls pages from sites like Akamai, SiteStats.info, and Ostats.net. "It appears that attackers have compromised the third-party library," writes BankInfoSecurity, adding that Malwarebytes estimates over a 1,000 more sites are using the same library.
Kill it! Kill it with fire!
Seriously.
Noting surprising here. And unless these people get limited in their greed and stupidity by really unpleasant and, most important, personal consequences for the CEO when that happens, nothing will change. No, I am not talking about firing them. I am talking about them paying for the damage and, depending how extreme their failure, prison time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Each site freaking horrible 20+ ad networks, brokers, analytics, and marketing networks middleman who are the ones being compromised. It is the fireclick.js which directs data from somewhere that uses data from somewhere which then piggybacks from somewhere else until BAM the malware JS gets executed and the pop up appears.
This system is totally unacceptable and retarded! All it takes if you use 20 different ad networks with ad brokers gettings things from the highest bidder is JUST ONE compromised or malicious player and the the trust is done.
Looking at the rest of the site (I am not a web architect but others reading this post who are please reply) show some red flags. Curl shows it uses IIS 7.5 which went EOL in 2015! No COR headers so cross domain shit can be run from anywhere from the network of players, and no forcing HTTPS to prevent snooping in a man in the middle attack.
This is why we run adblockers. And website owners have the gullibility to call us thieves for doing so. I mean even the bad SSL certificates have trusts in a chain. There is no trust when anyone can insert themselves in without encryption.
We need a better solution from the IEEE or W3C or something to address the problem.
http://saveie6.com/
Companies whose job is to secure the data of an entire nation should have an extreme case of NIH Syndrome. Sadly now its all copy-paste third party junk that no one can really trust.
Sorry to inform, but size matters.
You lose the bankroll battle.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If you need to have a secure site you can't use cross links.
Anything financial needs to have a secure site.
These "business" decisions are penny wise, pound foolish.
How many more CEOs have to resign in disgrace for the idiots to catch on?