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> "Our discovery is that both Javascript and Flash will also tell you if there’s a real user behind that inferface,” Mr. Kaminsky said." That isn't how that wo
by opendais 12y ago
> "Our discovery is that both Javascript and Flash will also tell you if there’s a real user behind that inferface,” Mr. Kaminsky said."
That isn't how that works. That isn't how any of it works.
Selenium + https://code.google.com/p/flash-selenium/ https://code.google.com/p/flash-selenium/ == Has both.
People who block flash & javascript for security reasons? Also blocks both.
The sheer ease of bypass and the rate of false positives for any sophisticated operator is going to be huge.
Maybe I'm overly skeptical but I don't see this filtering any bot operation that is sophisticated enough to run something like selenium.
EDIT:
Folks, I'm aware Selenium is a terrible example but it was the first thing that came to mind.
There are plenty of other headless toolkits that are easier to weaponize. Maybe I didn't want to point that out by linking to them/mentioning them? :|
- morley 12y agoIs there any research on how many botnets use Selenium? I would guess that most of them use something more basic just because it's a lot easier to put together.
- opendais 12y agoHow many use Selenium specifically? No. It was just a random example that was intended to not point in an easily weaponized direction. I figured it was both common and known in tech circles that Flash/Javascript executing botnets for ads existed and have for year(s): http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ They were acquired by Google so it isn't just random blog spam: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/google-acquires-spider-io-to-help-spot-and-stop-online-ad-fraud/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/google-acquires-spider-io-t...
- eli 12y agoMy personal experience with comment/forum spam bot networks is that at least 90% do not understand javascript. The ones that do tend to have extremely realistic traffic patterns and the ability to solve captchas. I suspect those are actually real people with incredibly crappy jobs, not super-intelligent Selenium-powered bots.
- paulgb 12y agoComment/forum spam is different game than botnet ad fraud. The latter executes JavaScript by design since it's often necessary to load the ads.
- acfou 12y agosee the charts from Incapsula in this article which show a third of the bots are not executing javascript https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140623200557-84444-five-separate-vendors-confirm-bot-traffic-in-60-range https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140623200557-8...
- kylequest 12y agoInstalling Selenenium on infected machines is not very stealthy. The new malware usually tries to stay in the kernel to avoid detection. Try stuffing Selenium in the kernel :-)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kylequest 12y agoI recommend reading about Dan a bit. He's not an amateur in the security world :-)
- scintill76 12y agoWhich makes it weirder, in a way. Surely such a security guru is going to be tweaking his personal browser, especially JS and Flash settings, and probably finding himself locked out of something for not looking enough like a typical clueless netizen. Or, he knows better than most how sophisticated and adaptive lucrative botnets are, so why would he think JS and Flash are deep magic the bots can't do? But, as others have noted, it's probably been boiled down into something dumb for the layperson, and their algorithms are more complex than you would think from that quote. Edit: Actually, given their target users, I guess he wouldn't be locked out, just falsely identified as a fake ad consumer.
- opendais 12y agoI don't care how well known he is. If that quote is accurate, he is peddling something that is known to not work in practice for the more sophisticated botnets.
- kylequest 12y agoThese quotes are never accurate because it's marketology spread by a PR firm :-)
- neilwillgettoit 12y agoThis is correct. If you ever look into how social media botnets are constructed and run, the good ones already do all the command and control through headless webkit tools. It's one of the primary reasons that it is so difficult to filter out whether or not a social profile is indeed a person or not from a statistical observation at mass.
- paulgb 12y agoThey're not looking for the presence/absence of JS/Flash but other things that can be measured by it. I assume their approach is similar to Spider.io (since acqui-hired by Google) which found (if I'm remembering correctly) that certain javascript calls ran differently or at different speeds depending on whether the browser instance was real. Similar to how software can detect whether it's running inside a VM because of subtle differences in how instructions are executed. That said, if I had a botnet I'd just figure out what domains belonged to WhiteOPs and null-route them.
- opendais 12y agoIf that is what it does, they should have clearly stated that in the article. Instead, its in a completely separate press release :/ EDIT: Its apparently stated here: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/White-Ops-Secures-7-Million-in-Series-A-Funding-1923780.htm http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/White-Ops-Secures-7... "White Ops offers the world's first systematic solution for accurately isolating and eliminating bot-infected traffic. By applying the techniques of Side Channel Analysis across thousands of real-time user session variables, White Ops differentiates between a human and machine-driven request -- regardless of the sophistication of the bot programmer and across the full spectrum of impression and click fraud techniques. This approach is vastly more effective than methods generally employed by legacy fraud detection services, which rely largely on historical data and statistical and predictive analysis to detect bot activity. "
- ryan-c 12y ago> That said, if I had a botnet I'd just figure out what domains belonged to WhiteOPs and null-route them. That and bots that don't execute javascript would be a problem, yes. Our clients can account for that by comparing their traffic numbers with ours. (full disclosure: I work at White Ops on the 'botprinting' team)
- thibauts 12y agoI'd be very interested in knowing more about how the technology works. It's pretty difficult to assess it without more information. Specifically it feels like the good old software protection conundrum where you have to give the keys along with the lock. How do you prevent a bot operator to send the right signal (or not send it) to the (whichever) measuring party ?