Third-Party Web Widgets Becoming Prime Malware Target: Report

By Liam Eagle, February 11, 2011

An image from the report, illustrating Firefox's malware warning graphic

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Website malware scanning and security firm Dasient (www.dasient.com) issued a report this week, examining the Web 2.0 structure used by many of the world’s most popular websites, and how the popularity of third-party widgets popular targets for malware, because of their potential as a kind of back door into popular websites.

The report, titled “The Widgetization of the Web” discusses the threat. It is available for download (in the form of a 19 page PDF) from the Dasient website.

“The compromise of just a few popular widgets can be used to turn the most trafficked web sites on the Internet into distribution vehicles for malware,” says a blog post discussing the paper on the Dasient website. “The paper also presents some case studies about how real analytics, audience measurement and advertising widgets have been used to infect high-profile websites with malware.”
One of the serious threats posed to a website that might be compromised via a third-party widget is blacklisting by Google or other search engines. And the greater threat, certainly, is the possibility that a site would unknowingly end up distributing malware to its customers. And, aside from blacklisting, a malware infection can be a significant PR hit to a company.
“When a website suffers a malware attack, it is an extremely high visibility security incident,” says Dasient, in the report. “Any single user that is running anti-virus software on their PC may encounter a warning upon loading an infected URL in their browser. Users that are warned away by their anti-virus may silently churn; or, they may report the event on their blog or social network.”
Dasient’s motivation in producing the research, of course, was in part to demonstrate the value of its website malware scanning services, which can inspect a website for infection by malware, either in its own code, or via a third-party widget.

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Web Host Industry Review: Weekend Reading – February 11, 2011

By Liam Eagle, February 11, 2011

A still from Go Daddy's Super Bowl ad, starring Joan Rivers

Related Topics: go daddy parallels rackspace whir events 2011 weekend reading

Every Friday, WHIR editor in chief Liam Eagle assembles some notes on stories from the web hosting industry this week that you might have missed or that might, for one reason or another, be worth revisiting. 

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Unlike the last several weeks, this week was somewhat shy of big hosting-related headlines. Most of the mainstream media spent at least some of this week looking back on the weekend’s Super Bowl, and we spent a little bit of time on that this week too.

As usual, Go Daddy ran an ad in the big game. And, as usual, the company reported huge spikes in web traffic following the appearance of the ad. The company said on Monday that not only did it exceed its previous records for traffic spikes, but that it had successfully managed to convert much of that traffic into sales. This time Go Daddy spent a bit of time on promoting the recently-launched .co domain.

While we’re on the subject of exciting things happening in Dallas during Feburary, the Super Bowl should come in a close second to our WHIR Networking Event, which will be happening in Dallas next Thursday, February 17. There’s still time for you to sign up, which you can do from this page.

Speaking of WHIR Networking Events, I posted some video footage from our Los Angeles event this week, which you can check out if you want to get a feel for how these things go. Or if you want to laugh at my weak attempts to amuse.

Back to the news.

Early on in the week, we reported on a battle between the Canadian Internet Registry authority and a provider of reseller domain registration whose right to sell the .ca domain was revoked because of its association with a reseller who was reportedly sending out misleading renewal notices.

And on Wednesday, I posted a feature about a new partnership between hosting software platform developer Parallels and Ksplice, the developer of the Uptrack software for updating Linux servers without rebooting – an arrangement the companies expect to be a boon for service providers.

And on Thursday, we reported that security firm Comodo had acquired DNS service provider DNS.com, and launched an authoritative DNS service based on its tools.

On Friday, we reported on Rackspace’s Q4 earnings report, which revealed, among other things, that CFO Bruce Knooihuizen is planning to retire, although he intends to stick around until a replacement can be found.

The last couple of stories are sort of loosely related data center construction matters.

On Thursday, we reported that Texas-based colocation firm FIBERTOWN is breaking ground on a 50,000 square foot data center, a project it is undertaking with the assistance of data center wholesaler Digital Realty Trust.

Friday we ran a cool story on i/o Data Centers opening a factory designed to produce its modular data center containers.

Finally, be sure to check out our Sales and Promos round-up for this week, if you want to grab some deals on hosting, domains and other related services.

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Amazon Acquires Dublin Site for Cloud Data Center

By Justin Lee, February 09, 2011

Netcraft's graph showing the number of Amazon and non-Amazon web servers in the past decade

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Amazon has acquired a former supermarket warehouse at Greenhills Industrial Estate near Dublin for the purpose of converting into a data center to meet the needs of its growing cloud computing services, according to a report by Data Center Knowledge.

The company recently acquired a 240,000 square foot building that was previously used as a storage house for UK supermarket chain Tesco. 
Amazon has also leased space for data center expansion in the Snughborough Industrial Estate in Ballycoolin and the Clonshaugh Industrial Estate, both of which are located in the Dublin area.
Amazon Web Services previously opened a facility in Dublin back in December 2008 to house the European availablity zones for its EC2 cloud computing services.

In December, the data center saw about a half an hour of downtime due to performance issues, which affected Amazon's European websites, including Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.at.

Ireland saw the largest growth in 2010 in the number of public-facing web servers in Netcraft's hosting provider server count, which can mostly be attributed to the large growth at Amazon's EC2 service.

"Amazon's cloud hosting now makes up more than a third of all internet-facing web servers in Ireland, with three times more web servers hosted than the next largest hosting location," writes Netcraft's Colin Phipps.
As Rich Miller points out in the Data Center Knowledge report, this latest acquisition "appears to be part of a broader effort" to attain more real estate to convert into data center space for Amazon Web Services.

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Sedo Announces Results of 2010 Domain Market Study

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

FBI Investigating NASDAQ DDOS Attacks

FBI Investigating NASDAQ DDOS Attacks

February 7th, 2011 By: THN News

(The Hosting News) – An investigation is now underway by Federal agents over numerous network intrusions that run the Nasdaq Stock exchange, according to cnet.
Although the hackers did not affect the exchange’s trading platforms, it is not quite clear at this time what other parts of the network were accessed.
The FBI recently launched an investigation and announced they are considering a range of motives for the intrusions, including a threat to national security, financial gain, and theft of trade secrets.
Reports say that those familiar with the investigation are saying that surfaced evidence points to Russia as the intruder’s location. However, investigators warn that the hackers may be using the country as a channel for their actions.
This is not the first time the Nasdaq has been targeted by hackers. In 1999, the group called “United Loan Gunmen” accessed the site and posted a headline entitled “United Loan Gunmen take control of Nasdaq stock market.” The headline was quickly erased and Nasdaq officials said that the trading platforms were never breached.

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Congress to Re-Introduce Internet ‘Kill Switch’ Bill

February 1st, 2011 By: THN News

 

(The Hosting News) - Legislation is being re-introduced to the Senate committee that will grant the president of the United States the power to shut down the internet access recent reports claim.

This announcement comes just days after Egypt’s own government removed access to the internet via ISPs to counter massive demonstrations in the country.

The bill itself is currently being floated by Senator Susan Collins, a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
This is a bi-partisan effort that was presented by Homeland Security in December of 2010 but expired the new Congress that took over just weeks later.
According to Wired, Collins claims the bill is intended to protect against “significant” cyber threats.
Collins goes on to say in an email, “My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency. It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”
As of now, no date has been set to re-introduce the bill to Congress as tweaks are still being made.

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Oregon Senator Questions Homeland Security's Domain Seizures

By Justin Lee, February 04, 2011

Visitors to the seized domains were met with an image saying the domain had been taken by Homeland Security

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has sent a letter to the head of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (www.ice.gov) that questions the agency's seizure of domain names over the past few months.

In late November, Homeland Security seized the domain names of more than 70 websites it said were involved in either the sale of counterfeit goods or the distribution of pirated material.

In the letter, the senator asks ICE ten questions he wants answered relating to their methods of seizing the domains.
Wyden has previously called out the government on its methods of fighting copyright infringement, which included putting the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act on hold before the end of the most recent congressional meeting.
He writes: "I write to learn more about the seizures of Internet domain names that your offices executed over the last year. These seizures represent a major shift in the way the US government combats copyright infringement in the digital environment."
The senator pointed out that a few of the sites that ICE shut down might not have been involved in any illegal actions.
He singles out Spanish site rojadirecta.org and music site dajaz1.com in the letter, asking ICE on the methods it used to confirm that these sites were engaging in illegal activities before shutting them down.
He argues that ICE seized dajaz1.com without first alerting the domain's owner that his site was being accused of illegal activity before shutting down the site.
Wyden also challenges the government's methods in using its power to invade the privacy of American citizens.
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Flickr Fighting Back

January 31st, 2011 By: THN News


(The Hosting News) – In an interview with New York Times, Blake Irving declared “Hell Yes We Are,” when prompted, is Yahoo committed to Flickr? Recent news around the photo sharing site hit the internet world with speculation of Flickr being sold.

This confusion over Flickr and their future is not surprising due to Yahoo’s recently declared plans to shut down or dispose of other web products including Delicious, the book marking service. With the industry boom of Facebook and their photo sharing services it will be a hard battle for Flickr to keep its users returning for the same services the social networking giant now offers.

Unique visitors to the photo sharing site Flickr have declined in the United States over the past year by 16 percent, totaling 21.3 million users still using the site, according to comScore. On the other hand, Facebook’s photo sharing users grew 92 percent to a startling 123.9 million users. No one doubts the appeal of Flickr’s high quality images, but the majority of users wish to post more family and life oriented photos leaving them with less photo bug sharing site needs.

“The Internet is starting to rotate around the axis of Facebook — not everything, but everything social,” Mr. Rohan said. “Yahoo and Flickr don’t really have the gravitational pull that would make Flickr the axis that they once imagined.”

Matthew Rothenberg, who heads Flickr, said he did not worry about Facebook and its growing user base, but rather about the quality of Flickr’s service. The rest, he said, will take care of itself. “To me it’s not a numbers game,” Mr. Rothenberg said. “I think we’re trying to build the best experience that we can and make sure our users are engaged and happy — and more and more of them will sign up.”

Flickr was founded in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and his wife at the time, Caterina Fake. The site quickly gained a following and a year later they sold the company to Yahoo for approximately $35 million.

Mr. Rothenberg’s best achievements over the last year are a redesigned photo page that offer larger images and a system for users to log into Flickr through their Google and Facebook accounts. The goal, Mr. Rothenberg said, is “to recall the experience of sharing photos before the digital age, when people would sit together on a couch, thumb through a photo album and tell stories.”

“What we are trying to do at Flickr ultimately is to use all these new technologies to get back to that experience — to get back to that rich storytelling experience — and to do it in the only way it can be done, with the technologies of today,” he said.

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Why Web Malware Is Like A Chameleon

February 1st, 2011 By: anirbansth

 (The Hosting News) -What is Web Malware: Web-based malware can be defined as malicious computer code, like viruses and trojans which infect websites in order to victimize unsuspecting web surfers. This kind of malware has been on the uptake since early 2007. Malicious hackers have found it hard to distribute malware via traditional means and have hit upon the weak link in the Internet food chain. They have realized that 90% of websites today have at least one major vulnerability which allows them to break into the website and infect it with web-based malware. Web-based malware is somewhat different from the usual slew of malware which infects PCs. This is so because malware deposited on websites, looks and acts in different manners than most strains of viruses. Consider the fact that more than 6,600 websites are compromised every single day.
How does it try to hide: Web-based malware uses a number of tricks to hide and stay under the radar while doing its nefarious deeds. We will look at two simple, but very effective techniques which have started becoming increasingly popular over the last few months.
Technique #1: Web-malware often tries to melt into benign and legitimate computer code by pretending to be benign computer code. An example of this can be found when malware tries to use code profiles, keywords, programming styles which mimic legitimate pieces of HTML, javascript, VBscript, PhP code. In fact in recent months we have seen an increase in the attempts of web-malware to pretending to be legitimate JQuery scripts. JQuery is a popular javascript framework which is used extensively on many websites. Web-malware authors are targeting this popular framework increasingly. If you host websites using JQuery, it is highly advisable to analyze your local JQuery installation and making sure that it is actually a legitimate copy. Live examples are present on our blog pages at Stopthehacker.com.
Technique #2: Another interesting trend that we have observed is web-malware trying to pretend to be software from well known Anti-Virus companies. Fake Anti-Virus malware is not anything new, however for web-malware to move in that direction is something relatively new. In fact we have found that web-malware is now trying to fake Norton Safeweb verification files. If you are hosting sites which sport a Norton Safeweb service, you might like to check the files which have the following pattern in their name: nortonsw_[uniquehashcode].txt. This attempt is to slip underneath the watchful eyes of an analyst/admin in the hopes that with a name like nortonsw, the admin will think its a file created by an Anti-Virus software and will not analyze it further.
What can you do:  As a hoster, you can keep your customer websites safer by taking advantage of new emerging, website “Health Monitoring” solutions. This kind of new technology, based on advanced AI and self-learning mechanisms can scan websites with minimum interruptions, is totally SaaS based and uses advanced machine learning to catch never-before-seen malware. This is a significant break from the way most traditional Anti-Virus software work. Cutting edge solutions like on-demand web scanning can help hosting companies identify rogue websites on their networks, protecting their reputation. It can also turn into a golden opportunity to increase recurring revenue and distinguish one’s self from the competition. For more details please get in touch with us at Stopthehacker.com .

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Cybercrime-Linked Web Host VolgaHost Goes Offline

By Justin Lee, February 01, 2011

A chart of HostExploit's "Bad Hosts" list which includes VolgaHost in the top ranking

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) --  Russian Web hosting provider VolgaHost (volga-host.ru) has been offline since January 17, according to a report by security website Softpedia.

The hosting provider has been known in the industry for hosting botnet command-and-control servers and other online crime-related services, such as ZeuS.
Security firms have also spotted infected websites, phishing pages, exploit servers and spam on VolgaHost's IP space.

The hosting provider is currently down, according to a query which shows that its IP range is offline. However, VolgaHost's main site appears to still be online as of Tuesday morning.

VolgaHost took the top position in malicious Web host-tracking firm HostExploit's "Bad Hosts" list for the fourth quarter of 2010, while ranking third in previous lists.

The Web host went offline on January 17 after it was depeered by its upstream provider, RUNNet.ru, the Russian State Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications, as well as many other ISPs that have been known to host ZeuS domains in the past including INFORMEX(AS20564), Naukanet (TopNET) UA (AS31445), PROMIRANET (AS31478), Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Internet eXchange (AS31506), Contel 2000 Ltd. (AS43181) and IT-OUTSOURCE-AS (AS48280).
HostExploit security analyst Jart Armin said the incident "was also related to community efforts with regard to AS39150 Vline Telecom (#6 Bad Host in the 2010 Q4 report), which was de-peered from its upstream provider RUNNet.ru."
Vline Telecom also has three additional upstream providers, Global Network Managment, ComLine and JSC Telenet. The company provides services to at least six known rogue Web hosting providers downstream.
The move is seen as a significant development in the ongoing crusade by researchers combating online crime activity.
However, the act of a rogue host going offline is only temporary as many others will soon take its place.
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