Sunday, November 11

IndiaTimes.com Visitors Risk High Exposure To Malware

Malware infection risk to Indiatimes visitors

:- Visitors to IndiaTimes.com, a major English-language Indian news site, risk infecting their computers with a deluge of malware, according to Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe.

"It's an entire cocktail of downloader Trojans and dropper Trojans," Landesman said Friday, putting the number of malicious files involved at 434. This includes scripts, binaries, cookies, and images.

Landesman characterized the size of the malicious payload as unusually large. She also noted that the attack involved a large number of Web sites. Analyzing just two of the binaries, she said that ScanSafe had identified at least 18 different IP addresses involved in the attack.

"Only certain pages of the IndiaTimes.com are infected," ScanSafe said in its Nov. 9 Threat Alert. "The impacted pages contain a script which points to a remote site containing iframes pointing to two additional sites. One of the sites included cookie scripts and an iframe pointing to a non-active site. The other iframe pointed to an encrypted script which exploits multiple vulnerabilities in an attempt to download malicious software onto susceptible systems of users visiting indiatimes.com."

"It appears that the Metasploit Framework was the framework used to facilitate these attacks," Landesman said. The Metasploit Framework is a security testing tool that can also be used maliciously.

Landesman decline to elaborate on the specifics of the exploit other than to say it involved cross-site scripting and that it could turn the victim's computer into a site for malware distribution. "We have reason to believe these are zero-day vulnerabilities," she said. "What we don't want to do is irresponsibly lead people to those exploit pages."

ScanSafe's Nov. 9 Threat Alert identifies one of the vulnerabilities as the MDAC vulnerability described in Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-014.

Warning that much of current antivirus software misses this exploit, Landesman said that "a person even with up-to-date antivirus software is going to be susceptible to this. In the normal course of using this service, you'd arrive at this page and you'd be silently infected."

Malware Planted on MySpace Once Again

Attackers are piggybacking on the fame of R&B recording artist Alicia Keys to spread their malware over the Web. Keys' MySpace page has been infected with malicious software.

Exploit Prevention Labs discovered the attack, one of several targeted MySpace pages. French funk band Greements of Fortune and Glasgow rock band Dykeenies were also targets of the Web-based attack.

"When a visitor visits the infected page, they're first hit by an exploit which installs malware in the background if they're not fully patched against the latest security vulnerabilities, and next they're presented with a fake codec which tells them they need to install a codec to view the video," said Roger Thompson, CTO at Exploit Prevention Labs. "So even if they're patched, they can fall victim to the exploit."

One Hack After Another
Specifically, visitors to these MySpace pages are directed to co8vd.cn/s. This appears to be a Chinese malware site. If the visitors accept the code installation, the site installs malicious software. You can view a video demonstration of the attack on YouTube.

The hack has some interesting characteristics, Thompson explained. "Perhaps most interesting, the bad guys are using a creative hack we haven't seen before: The HTML in the page contains some sort of image map, which basically makes it so you can click on anything over a wide area on the page and your click is directed to the malicious hyperlink," he said. "We tested it and even the ads were affected."

MySpace officials could not immediately be reached for comment, but Thompson reported that the popular social-networking site fixed the pages in question within hours of the discovery. However, yet another hack was discovered just a few hours later, and a new image code has appeared that Thompson warned could be coming online soon.

Online Privacy Policies Don't Do Their Job, Critics Say

Online privacy policies need to be easier to understand and more conspicuous because few people now actually read them, said panelists at a U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop on targeted online advertising.

While privacy policies can help users understand what personal information is being collected, they often need "college-level reading skills" to understand them, said Lorrie Faith Cranor, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who's done research on privacy policies.

Cranor suggested FTC action may be necessary to help standardize privacy notices online. "We should look at the whole picture and think, 'Do we need nutrition labels for privacy?'" she said during the second day of an FTC workshop examining concerns about targeted online advertising.

Representatives of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo told audience members they're working to make privacy policies easier to understand and notices about data collection more immediate.

Representatives of eBay and Yahoo said their companies are experimenting with small question-mark shaped links on targeted ads that explain why a customer was shown the ad.

Microsoft tries to provide frequent links to its privacy policy, and makes it available every time customers sign up for a service, said Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft. "Now, do we make sure they have to scroll through the short-form [privacy] notice?" he said. "No, because in all honesty, our customers have said that's overdoing it."

But Esther Dyson, Internet policy commentator and founder of EDventure.com, called on online advertising companies to use the same "brilliance" they have for delivering targeted ads to deliver targeted privacy policies and data-collection warnings to individual Web users.

Static privacy polices have limited appeal, she said. "I don't think you can force consumers to look at this stuff," Dyson said. "If they're interested, they do click. The problem is what they can find when they click, which is mostly incomprehensible."

She called on Web sites to tell individuals specifically what information is collected about them.

But "just-in-time" privacy notices take up space, said some panelists. "Every pixel fights for its life," Cullen said.

Joel Winston, associate director of the FTC's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, opened the second day of the e-behavioral workshop by asking whether privacy notices could be made better, or whether they just don't work.

Part of the problem is that many privacy policies change without warning, and users have to go back to the policy to see the changes, said Carlos Jensen, a computer science professor at Oregon State University. "Reading a privacy policy that could change five seconds after you read it means I'm not going to bother," he said.

More standardization of privacy notices is needed, Jensen said. Web users don't want to wade through multiple Web sites with different privacy notices in different locations, he said.

But Web sites are still experimenting with the best ways to deliver privacy notices, said Colin O'Malley, director of strategic business at Truste. Web sites should still be allowed to figure the best approach before the FTC gets involved, he said.

"We don't want to lead with a prescription," he said.

A better system is needed, and Web sites need to give more detailed information about the personal data they collect, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a critic of targeted advertising practices.

"There has to be a simple, unified way to tell the individual exactly what is going on," he said. "Why can't you say you're collecting and targeting and profiling this information? Why can't you say [to users] what you tell your clients?"