Browser extensions have been established as a common feature present in modern browsers. However, some extension systems risk exposing APIs which are too permissive and cohesive with the browser's internal structure, thus leaving a hole for malicious developers to exploit security critical functionality within the browser itself. In this paper, we raise the awareness of the threats caused by browser extensions by presenting a botnet framework based on malicious extensions installed in the user's browser, and an exhaustive range of attacks that can be launched in this framework. We systematically categorize, describe and implement these attacks against Chrome, Firefox and Firefox-for-Android, and verify experiments on Windows, Linux and Android systems. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents to date the most comprehensive analysis about the threats of botnet in modern browsers due to the over-privileged capabilities possessed by browser extensions. We also discuss countermeasures to the identified problems.
Cybersecurity, security monitoring of malicious events in IP traffic, is an important field largely unexplored by statisticians. Computer scientists have made significant contributions in this area using statistical anomaly detection and other supervised learning methods to detect specific malicious events. In this research, we investigate the detection of botnet command and control (C&C) hosts in massive IP traffic. We use the NetFlow data, the industry standard for monitoring of IP traffic for exploratory analysis and extracting new features. Using statistical as well as deep learning models…
Botnets are considered one of the most dangerous and serious security threats facing the networks and the Internet. Comparing with the other security threats, botnet members have the ability to be directed and controlled via C&C messages from the botmaster over common protocols such as IRC and HTTP, or even over covert and unknown applications. As for IRC botnets, general security instances like firewalls and IDSes do not provide by themselves a viable solution to prevent them completely. These devices could not differentiate well between the legitimate and malicious traffic of the IRC protoco…
Botnet is most widespread and occurs commonly in today's cyber attacks, resulting in serious threats to our network assets and organization's properties. Botnets are collections of compromised computers (Bots) which are remotely controlled by its originator (BotMaster) under a common Command-and-Control (C&C) infrastructure. They are used to distribute commands to the Bots for malicious activities such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, spam and phishing. Most of the existing Botnet detection approaches concentrate only on particular Botnet command and control (C&C) protocols (e.…
In general, a botnet is a collection of compromised internet computers, controlled by attackers for malicious purposes. To increase attacks' success chance and resilience against defence mechanisms, modern botnets have often a decentralized P2P structure. Here, IoT devices are playing a critical role, becoming one of the major tools for malicious parties to perform attacks. Notable examples are DDoS attacks on Krebs on Security and DYN, which have been performed by IoT devices part of botnets. We take a first step towards detecting P2P botnets in IoT, by proposing AutoBotCatcher, whose design …
Botnets are networks of compromised computers with malicious code which are remotely controlled and which are used for starting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, sending enormous number of e-mails (SPAM) and other sorts of attacks. Defense against modern Botnets is a real challenge. This paper offers several strategies for defense against Botnets with a list and description of measures and activities which should be carried out in order to establish successful defense. The paper also offers parallel preview of the strategies with their advantages and disadvantages considered in acc…
Botnets (networks of compromised computers) are often used for malicious activities such as spam, click fraud, identity theft, phishing, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Most of previous researches have introduced fully or partially signature-based botnet detection approaches. In this paper, we propose a fully anomaly-based approach that requires no a priori knowledge of bot signatures, botnet C&C protocols, and C&C server addresses. We start from inherent characteristics of botnets. Bots connect to the C&C channel and execute the received commands. Bots belonging to the same …
Website publishers can derive enormous performance benefits and cost savings by directing traffic to their sites through content distribution networks (CDNs). However, publishers who use CDNs today must trust their CDN not to modify the site's JavaScript, CSS, images or other media en route to end users. A CDN that violates this trust could inject ads into websites, downsample media to save bandwidth or, worse, inject malicious JavaScript code to steal user secrets it could not otherwise access. We present Stickler, a system for website publishers that guarantees the end-to-end authenticity of…
Modern websites include various types of third-party content such as JavaScript, images, stylesheets, and Flash objects in order to create interactive user interfaces. In addition to explicit inclusion of third-party content by website publishers, ISPs and browser extensions are hijacking web browsing sessions with increasing frequency to inject third-party content (e.g., ads). However, third-party content can also introduce security risks to users of these websites, unbeknownst to both website operators and users. Because of the often highly dynamic nature of these inclusions as well as the u…
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院喷气推进实验室）
Botnets are becoming increasingly prevalent as the primary enabling technology in a variety of malicious campaigns such as email spam, click fraud, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and cryptocurrency mining. Botnet technology has continued to evolve rapidly making detection a very challenging problem. There is a fundamental need for robust detection methods that are insensitive to characteristics of a specific botnet and are generalizable across different botnet types. We propose a novel supervised approach to detect malicious botnet hosts by tracking a host's network activity ove…
The proliferation of web applications has essentially transformed modern browsers into small but powerful operating systems. Upon visiting a website, user devices run implicitly trusted script code, the execution of which is confined within the browser to prevent any interference with the user's system. Recent JavaScript APIs, however, provide advanced capabilities that not only enable feature-rich web applications, but also allow attackers to perform malicious operations despite the confined nature of JavaScript code execution. In this paper, we demonstrate the powerful capabilities that mode…
Recently, botnets such as Mirai and Persirai targeted IoT devices on a large scale. We consider attacks by botnets on cyber-physical systems (CPS), which require advanced capabilities such as controlling the physical processes in real-time. Traditional botnets are not suitable for this goal mainly because they lack process control capabilities, are not optimized for low latency communication, and bots generally do not leverage local resources. We argue that such attacks would require cyber-physical botnets. A cyber-physical botnet needs coordinated and heterogeneous bots, capable of performing…
In this paper, we address an unsolved problem in the real world: how to ensure the integrity of the web content in a browser in the presence of malicious browser extensions? The problem of exposing confidential user credentials to malicious extensions has been widely understood, which has prompted major banks to deploy two-factor authentication. However, the importance of the `integrity' of the web content has received little attention. We implement two attacks on real-world online banking websites and show that ignoring the `integrity' of the web content can fundamentally defeat two-factor so…
Browser Extensions (often called plugins or addons) are small pieces of code that let developers add additional functionality to the browser. However, with extensions comes a security price: the user must trust the developer. We look at ways in which this trust can be broken and malicious extensions installed. We also look at silent installations of plugins in various browsers and work on ways to make silent installations possible in browsers that work against it. We compare the browser extension mechanism among various browsers, and try to create a set of rules to maintain the principle of le…
We present the Maestro attack, a novel Link Flooding Attack (LFA) that leverages control-plane traffic engineering techniques to concentrate botnet-sourced Distributed Denial of Service flows on transit links. Executed from a compromised or malicious Autonomous System (AS), Maestro advertises specific-prefix routes poisoned for selected ASes to collapse inbound traffic paths onto a single target link. A greedy heuristic fed by publicly available AS relationship data iteratively builds the set of ASes to poison. Given a compromised BGP speaker with advantageous positioning relative to the targe…
Botnets have become a serious security threat not only to the Internet but also to the devices connected to it. Factors like the exponential growth of IoT, the COVID-19 pandemic that's sweeping the planet, and the ever-larger number of cyber-criminals who now have access to or have developed increasingly more sophisticated tools are incentivizing the growth of botnets in this domain. The recent outbreak of botnets like Dark Nexus (derived from Qbot and Mirai), Mukashi, LeetHozer, Hoaxcalls, etc. shows the alarming rate at which this threat is converging. The botnets have attributes that make t…
Despite the surging development and utilization of IoT devices, the security of IoT devices is still in infancy. The security pitfalls of IoT devices have made it easy for hackers to take over IoT devices and use them for malicious activities like botnet attacks. With the rampant emergence of IoT devices, botnet attacks are surging. The botnet attacks are not only catastrophic for IoT device users but also for the rest of the world. Therefore, there is a crucial need to identify and mitigate the possible threats in IoT devices during the design phase. Threat modelling is a technique that is us…
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) botnets are becoming widely used as a low-overhead, efficient, self-maintaining, distributed alternative to the traditional client/server model across a broad range of cyberattacks. These cyberattacks can take the form of distributed denial of service attacks, authentication cracking, spamming, cyberwarfare or malware distribution targeting on financial systems. These attacks can also cross over into the physical world attacking critical infrastructure causing its disruption or destruction (power, communications, water, etc.). P2P technology lends itself well to being exploi…
One of the most significant threats faced by enterprise networks today is from Bots. A Bot is a program that operates as an agent for a user and runs automated tasks over the internet, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. A collection of Bots in a network, used for malicious purposes is referred to as a Botnet. Bot attacks can range from localized attacks like key-logging to network intensive attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). In this paper, we suggest a novel approach that can detect and combat Bots. The proposed solution adopts a two pronged strateg…
In-browser cryptojacking involves hijacking the CPU power of a website's visitor to perform CPU-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and has been on the rise, with 8500% growth during 2017. While some websites advocate cryptojacking as a replacement for online advertisement, web attackers exploit it to generate revenue by embedding malicious cryptojacking code in highly ranked websites. Motivated by the rise of cryptojacking and the lack of any prior systematic work, we set out to analyze malicious cryptojacking statically and dynamically, and examine the economical basis of cryptojacking as an al…
The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-blocking software, such as new ad-blocking and privacy-oriented browsers or browser extensions. In response, both ad publishers and ad networks are constantly trying to pursue new strategies to keep up their revenues. To this end, ad networks have started to leverage the Web Push technology enabled by modern web browsers. As web push notifications (WPNs) are relatively new, their role in ad delivery has not been yet studied in depth. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent WPN ads are being abused for malvertising (i.e., to d…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a core Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. It is a distributed database and protocol with many known weaknesses that subject to countless attacks including spoofing attacks, botnets, and domain name registrations. Still, the debate between security and privacy is continuing, that is DNS over TLS or HTTP, and the lack of adoption of DNS security extensions, put users at risk. Consequently, the security of domain names and characterizing malicious websites is becoming a priority. This paper analyzes the difference between the malicious…
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are usually launched through the $botnet$, an "army" of compromised nodes hidden in the network. Inferential tools for DDoS mitigation should accordingly enable an early and reliable discrimination of the normal users from the compromised ones. Unfortunately, the recent emergence of attacks performed at the application layer has multiplied the number of possibilities that a botnet can exploit to conceal its malicious activities. New challenges arise, which cannot be addressed by simply borrowing the tools that have been successfully applied so far t…
Browser extensions are small applications executed in the browser context that provide additional capabilities and enrich the user experience while surfing the web. The acceptance of extensions in current browsers is unquestionable. For instance, Chrome's official extension repository has more than 63,000 extensions, with some of them having more than 10M users. When installed, extensions are pushed into an internal queue within the browser. The order in which each extension executes depends on a number of factors, including their relative installation times. In this paper, we demonstrate how …
The threats posed by botnets in the cyberspace continue to grow each day and it has become very hard to detect or infiltrate the cynicism of bots. This, is owing to the fact, that, the botnet developers each day, keep changing the propagation and attack techniques. Currently, most of these attacks have been centered on stealing computing energy, theft of personal information and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In this paper, the authors propose a novel technique that uses the Non-Deterministic Polynomial-Time Hardness (NP-Hard Problem) based on the Traveling Salesperson Person (T…
This paper presents a specific man-in-the-middle exploit: Ambient Tactical Deception (ATD) in online communication, realized via a malicious web browser extension. Extensions manipulate web content in unobtrusive ways as ambient intermediaries of the overall browsing experience. In our previous work, we demonstrated that it is possible to employ tactical deception by making covert changes in the text content of a web page, regardless of the source. In this work, we investigated the application of ATD in a web-based email discourse where the objective is to manipulate the interpersonal percepti…
Several studies have been conducted on understanding third-party user tracking on the web. However, web trackers can only track users on sites where they are embedded by the publisher, thus obtaining a fragmented view of a user's online footprint. In this work, we investigate a different form of user tracking, where browser extensions are repurposed to capture the complete online activities of a user and communicate the collected sensitive information to a third-party domain. We conduct an empirical study of spying browser extensions on the Chrome Web Store. First, we present an in-depth analy…
In September 2017, McAffee Labs quarterly report estimated that brute force attacks represent 20\% of total network attacks, making them the most prevalent type of attack ex-aequo with browser based vulnerabilities. These attacks have sometimes catastrophic consequences, and understanding their fundamental limits may play an important role in the risk assessment of password-secured systems, and in the design of better security protocols. While some solutions exist to prevent online brute-force attacks that arise from one single IP address, attacks performed by botnets are more challenging. In …
As social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly popular, a growing number of malicious attacks, such as phishing and malware, are exploiting them. Among these attacks, social botnets have sophisticated infrastructure that leverages compromised users accounts, known as bots, to automate the creation of new social networking accounts for spamming and malware propagation. Traditional defense mechanisms are often passive and reactive to non-zero-day attacks. In this paper, we adopt a proactive approach for enhancing security in social networks by infiltrating botn…
Université Libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；Royal Military Academy（皇家军事学院）；Ecole Militaire Polytechnique（军事理工学院）
Due to the numerous advantages of machine learning (ML) algorithms, many applications now incorporate them. However, many studies in the field of image classification have shown that MLs can be fooled by a variety of adversarial attacks. These attacks take advantage of ML algorithms' inherent vulnerability. This raises many questions in the cybersecurity field, where a growing number of researchers are recently investigating the feasibility of such attacks against machine learning-based security systems, such as intrusion detection systems. The majority of this research demonstrates that it is…
Comprehensive Botnet Detection by Mitigating Adversarial Attacks, Navigating the Subtleties of Perturbation Distances and Fortifying Predictions with Conformal Layers
Several hundred Tor exit relays together push more than 1 GiB/s of network traffic. However, it is easy for exit relays to snoop and tamper with anonymised network traffic and as all relays are run by independent volunteers, not all of them are innocuous. In this paper, we seek to expose malicious exit relays and document their actions. First, we monitored the Tor network after developing a fast and modular exit relay scanner. We implemented several scanning modules for detecting common attacks and used them to probe all exit relays over a period of four months. We discovered numerous maliciou…
Machine learning (ML) started to become widely deployed in cyber security settings for shortening the detection cycle of cyber attacks. To date, most ML-based systems are either proprietary or make specific choices of feature representations and machine learning models. The success of these techniques is difficult to assess as public benchmark datasets are currently unavailable. In this paper, we provide concrete guidelines and recommendations for using supervised ML in cyber security. As a case study, we consider the problem of botnet detection from network traffic data. Among our findings we…
Conforming to W3C specifications, mobile web browsers allow JavaScript code in a web page to access motion and orientation sensor data without the user's permission. The associated risks to user security and privacy are however not considered in W3C specifications. In this work, for the first time, we show how user security can be compromised using these sensor data via browser, despite that the data rate is 3 to 5 times slower than what is available in app. We examine multiple popular browsers on Android and iOS platforms and study their policies in granting permissions to JavaScript code wit…
Cybersecurity attacks are growing both in frequency and sophistication over the years. This increasing sophistication and complexity call for more advancement and continuous innovation in defensive strategies. Traditional methods of intrusion detection and deep packet inspection, while still largely used and recommended, are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of growing security threats. As computing power increases and cost drops, Machine Learning is seen as an alternative method or an additional mechanism to defend against malwares, botnets, and other attacks. This paper explores Machi…
A Machine Learning Driven Website Platform and Browser Extension for Real-time Scoring and Fraud Detection for Website Legitimacy Verification and Consumer Protection
University of Central Arkansas（中阿肯色大学）；University of Texas at El Paso（德克萨斯大学埃尔帕索分校）
A crucial technical challenge for cybercriminals is to keep control over the potentially millions of infected devices that build up their botnets, without compromising the robustness of their attacks. A single, fixed C&C server, for example, can be trivially detected either by binary or traffic analysis and immediately sink-holed or taken-down by security researchers or law enforcement. Botnets often use Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs), primarily to evade take-down attempts. DGAs can enlarge the lifespan of a malware campaign, thus potentially enhancing its profitability. They can also con…
In late 2017, a sudden proliferation of malicious JavaScript was reported on the Web: browser-based mining exploited the CPU time of website visitors to mine the cryptocurrency Monero. Several studies measured the deployment of such code and developed defenses. However, previous work did not establish how many users were really exposed to the identified mining sites and whether there was a real risk given common user browsing behavior. In this paper, we present a retroactive analysis to close this research gap. We pool large-scale, longitudinal data from several vantage points, gathered during…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are present in many settings addressing a myriad of purposes. Examples are Internet-of-Things (IoT) or sensing software embedded in appliances or even specialised meters that measure and respond to electricity demands in smart grids. Due to their pervasive nature, they are usually chosen as recipients for larger scope cyber-security attacks. Those promote system-wide disruptions and are directed towards one key aspect such as confidentiality, integrity, availability or a combination of those characteristics. Our paper focuses on a particular and distressing attack …
Beyond the Trust Boundary: A Critical Reassessment of the FIDO2 Threat Model
CyberMACS；Kadir Has University（卡迪尔·哈斯大学）；DigitalFortress Private Limited（DigitalFortress私人有限公司）；Indominus Labs Private Limited（Indominus Labs私人有限公司）；Centre of Excellence, Cyber Security（网络安全卓越中心）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；VIT-AP University, India（印度VIT-AP大学）；Centre of Excellence, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics (AIR)（人工智能与机器人（AIR）卓越中心）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering（电子与通信工程学院）；Centre of Excellence, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIR)（人工智能与机器人（AIR）卓越中心）
