Title
Peering through the iframe
Abstract
Drive-by-download attacks have become the method of choice for cyber-criminals to infect machines with malware. Previous research has focused on developing techniques to detect web sites involved in drive-by-download attacks, and on measuring their prevalence by crawling large portions of the Internet. In this paper, we take a different approach at analyzing and understanding drive-by-download attacks. Instead of horizontally searching the Internet for malicious pages, we examine in depth one drive-by-download campaign, that is, the coordinated efforts used to spread malware. In particular, we focus on the Mebroot campaign, which we periodically monitored and infiltrated over several months, by hijacking parts of its infrastructure and obtaining network traces at an exploit server. By studying the Mebroot drive-by-download campaign from the inside, we could obtain an in-depth and comprehensive view into the entire life-cycle of this campaign and the involved parties. More precisely, we could study the security posture of the victims of drive-by attacks (e.g., by measuring the prevalence of vulnerable software components and the effectiveness of software updating mechanisms), the characteristics of legitimate web sites infected during the campaign (e.g., the infection duration), and the modus operandi of the miscreants controlling the campaign.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5935193
Shanghai
Keywords
Field
DocType
Internet,Web sites,computer crime,invasive software,Internet,Mebroot drive-by-download campaign,Web sites,cyber-criminals,drive-by-download attacks,iFrame,malicious pages,malware
Software upgrade,Internet privacy,Crawling,Computer science,Computer security,Computer network,Exploit,Software,Component-based software engineering,Malware,Peering,The Internet
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0743-166X
978-1-4244-9919-9
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.92
10
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brett Stone-Gross152128.74
Marco Cova2142571.19
Christopher Kruegel38799516.05
Giovanni Vigna47121507.72