New McAfee Whitepaper on Browser Attacks

Today we at McAfee Avert Labs released an excellent paper on browser attacks. Written by Christoph Alme, this paper deals with the many complexities of browser security and attacks. From the paper:

Web Browsers: An Emerging Platform Under Attack
“The widespread use of highly interactive “rich client” web applications for e-commerce, business networking, and online collaboration has finally catapulted web browsers from straightforward HTML viewers to a full-blown software platform. And as corporate users are performing a significant portion of their work on the web, whether it’s researching or collaborating, the safety of the underlying platform is critical to the company’s success. “

Other areas the paper covers include:

Ӣ The shift in spam to mainly malicious web link usage

”¢ “Web 2.0” sites””whether weblogs, social networking or portal sites””are increasingly spammed with links to malicious sites

Ӣ Legitimate sites are compromised and misused to either host malicious code or link to a malicious website

Ӣ Use of malicious video banners placed in advertisement networks

”¢ Use of popular search terms to advertise and drive (search query) traffic to a malicious website. In a recent case in Germany, attackers used Google AdWords to attract users who searched for “flash player” to the attacker’s fake Adobe-look-alike site

Download the paper in its entirety here.