Businesses are compromising their own customers through lax web security

It finds that, with the alarming increase in attacks using legitimate business websites as launching pads for attacks against consumers, cybercriminals are turning businesses against their own customers in their effort to steal personal data. The new X-Force report identifies two main trends: first, web sites have become the Achilles’ heel for corporate IT security; and second, although attackers continue to focus on the browser and ActiveX controls as a way to compromise end-user machines, they are turning to new types of exploits that link to malicious documents, such as PDFs. Kris Lamb, senior operations manager, X-Force Research and Development for IBM Internet Security Systems, says that attackers are focused on attacking web applications so that they can infect end-user machines. Meanwhile, companies are using off-the-shelf applications “riddled with vulnerabilities or even worse, custom applications that can host numerous unknown vulnerabilities that can’t be patched”. “The purpose of these automated attacks is to deceive and redirect web surfers to web browser exploit toolkits,” says Lamb. “This is one of the oldest forms of mass attack still in existence today. “It is staggering that we still see SQL injection attacks in widespread use, without adequate patching, almost 10 years after they were first disclosed. Cybercriminals target businesses because they provide an easy target to launch attacks against anyone that visits the Web.” As for PDF (and similar) attacks, he says that in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, IBM X-Force found a more than 50% increase in the number of malicious URLs hosting exploits, compared with all of 2007. “Even spammers are turning to known web sites for expanded reach. The technique of hosting spam messages on popular blogs and news-related websites more than doubled in the second half of last year.” Lamb believes the security industry can better prioritise its response to vulnerability disclosures – currently done through the industry-standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). He observes that CVSS focuses on the technical aspects of a vulnerability, such as severity and ease-of-exploitation, and notes that, while they are important, they do not capture the primary motivator: greed. “The CVSS provides an essential base that the security industry desperately needs to measure security threats,” says Lamb. “But we also realise that cybercriminals are motivated by money, and we need to fully consider how attackers balance the economic opportunity of a vulnerability against the costs of exploitation. “If the security industry can better understand the motivations of computer criminals, it can do a better job of determining when emergency patching is most needed in the face of immediate threats. We can also be more precise about determining when widespread exploitation of a vulnerability will take a long time to emerge, and when it is unlikely to ever emerge. This analysis could result in more efficient use of time and resources.”