What’s a Trusted Website?
Modern browsers and infrastructure include a few safeguards.
These are just a few visual indicators:
Seeing them assures that a given site should be secure.
Here’s the scenario.
You visit a large reputable organization online. You believe it’s secure because
you see one of the visual indicators above. You expect that, because it’s
a well-established business, it has the resources and
capabilities needed to secure its website.
Wrong. Any site can be vulnerable to attack
and visitors and users would have no way
of knowing that they are at risk.
As a matter of fact, IT professionals
can’t diagnose some breaches
until it’s too late.
Let’s dig in.
Hackers have countless ways to try to access a site illegally.
Here are some ways even trusted websites can come under attack:
- Cookies
- Cross-Site Scripting
- Watering Holes
Forged Cookies
Hackers can forge these kinds of cookies to impersonate a victim, tricking a website into giving them access to the victim’s account.
Malicious Cookies
Many sites use cookies for profiling and tracking for legitimate purposes, like advertising and analytics. Malicious cookies, however, extract private information from websites when you haven’t logged out or that contain unexpired cookies used to maintain sessions over short periods of time.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-site scripting is an attack that delivers malicious code to end-users through trusted websites and applications.
With XSS, an attacker does not target a victim directly, but uses a vulnerability within a website or application as a vehicle to deliver a malicious script to the victim’s web browser.
The script can have several negative side effects, including:
-
allowing the attacker to
impersonate the victim -
gaining access to
passwords and other
sensitive information and -
hijacking a victim’s browsing
session altogether.
Watering Holes
Watering holes implant malware into reputable websites that targeted victims are likely to visit. The goal is to infect victims’ computers and gain access to their networks.
Let’s get real.
Yahoo and Forbes
are two examples
of trusted websites that have been compromised by hackers. Yahoo suffered a forged cookie attack in which hackers stole data from more than a billion customer accounts.
The Forbes Compromise occurred when a Chinese group infected the Forbes.com website with a watering hole attack.
Millions of users visited the site
during the attack.
The protections in place shielded most of the would-be-victims from the attack, according to two malware protection companies, iSight and Invincea.
The attackers were seeking the user profiles of leaders
in the defense and financial industries in order to gain access to their respective networks.