VB2014 paper: Optimized mal-ops. Hack the ad network like a boss

Why buying ad space makes perfect sense for those wanting to spread malware.

Over the next few months, we will be sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘Optimized mal-ops. Hack the ad network like a boss’ by Bromium researchers Vadim Kotov and Rahul Kashyap.

Malicious advertisements (‘malvertising’) go back more than a decade, yet in recent months we have seen a surge in these attacks, including the ‘

Kyle and Stan

‘ campaign, which affected

Yahoo

,

YouTube

and

Amazon

, among others, and the

campaign

that used ads bought at

DoubleClick

and

Zedo

to spread malware via the website of some Israeli newspapers.

This surge was predicted in Vadim Kotov and Rahul Kashyap’s VB2014 paper – the paper also explains why it makes sense for cybercriminals to turn to malvertising.

If a cybercriminal wants to spread malware, a common way to do so is by serving exploit kits on compromised websites that drop the malware onto the machines of vulnerable visitors. However, the attacker has little control over who visits the website, and has to depend on compromising the site in the first place.

So what if an attacker could just pay to serve malware on just about any popular website and even get to choose to which demographic the malware is being served? This is exactly how online advertising works and is the very reason why, unless you use tools that block trackers, most of the ads you will come across on websites you have never visited before are somewhat relevant to your browsing history.

The

Bromium

researchers show how the power of

Adobe Flash Player

makes

Flash

banners an ideal vector for serving malware, while the targeting of ads means that an attacker can even choose only to serve the ads to visitors using, say,

Internet Explorer

and

Windows XP

. In his presentation in Seattle, Vadim performed a demonstration in which he was easily able to hide the payload of a malicious advertisement in an innocent-looking PNG file.

You can read the paper

here

in HTML-format, or download it

here

as a PDF (no registration or subscription required). You can download the presentation slides

here

. We have also uploaded the presentation to our

YouTube

channel.

Last month, Rahul was

interviewed

by the

Risky Business

podcast on the findings of the paper.

Posted on 18 November 2014 by

Martijn Grooten