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Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

Attackers Use Fake Friends to Blend into Facebook

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Attackers Use Fake Friends to Blend into Facebook

Barracuda Labs Unveils New Research Study Analyzing Facebook Profiles

View the Infographic: Facebook: Fake Profiles vs. Real Users at http://www.barracudalabs.com/fbinfographic/.

Campbell, Calif. (February 2, 2012) – Barracuda Networks, a leading provider of security, networking and data protection solutions, today released findings from Barracuda Labs’ most recent study, Facebook: Fake Profiles vs. Real Users. The study analyzes a random sampling of 2,884 active Facebook accounts to identify key differences between average real user accounts and fake accounts created by attackers and spammers. The results of the study are being presented today at the 2012 Kaspersky Threatpost Security Analyst Summit in Cancun, Mexico.

Facebook, which filed for IPO this week, has become an important part of personal and business communication. The company consistently fights to keep attackers out of its network, most recently announcing its lawsuit against a marketing firm accused of “spreading spam through misleading and deceptive tactics”. The Barracuda Labs study provides yet another example of this “arms race” as an increasing number of attackers move to social networks to carry out their wares.

Highlighted findings from the Barracuda Labs study include:
•    Almost 60 percent of fake accounts claim to be bisexual, 10 times more than real users
•    Fake accounts have six times more friends than real users, 726 versus 130
•    Fake accounts use photo tags over 100 times more than real users, 136 tags per four photos versus one tag per four photos
•    Fake accounts almost always (97 percent) claim to be female, as opposed to 40 percent for real users

“Likes, News Feeds and Apps have helped lead Facebook to its social network dominance and now attackers are harnessing those same features to efficiently scale their efforts,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks. “These fake profiles and apps give attackers a long-lived path to continuously present malicious links to innocent users.

“Also, researchers have shown how friending malicious accounts can lead to account takeover using Facebook’s trusted friend account recovery,” Judge continued. “We have analyzed thousands of fake accounts to determine features and patterns that distinguish them from real users, and created a feature-based heuristic engine to distinguish real users from fake profiles.”

The study analyzes data collected from Barracuda Profile Protector, a free tool that analyzes and blocks malicious activity on Facebook and Twitter, along with public data collected from streams and network crawling to demonstrate how users typically operate. The study illustrates how attacks on Facebook are structured to exploit the “friendship” concept and trust of widely-used applications. A variety of machine learning techniques are used to analyze shared URLs, profile images, profile information, and connections with other users to reveal associations, weak and strong, between malicious users.

Resources:
•    Download the Infographic: Facebook: Fake Profiles vs. Real Users at http://www.barracudalabs.com/fbinfographic/.
•    View the Barracuda Labs security research portal at http://barracudalabs.com.
•    Install Profile Protector at http://ProfileProtector.com.
•    Follow Barracuda Labs on Twitter at @barracudalabs

About Barracuda Labs
Barracuda Labs is a global multi-disciplinary research and threat analysis team that fulfills a critical role in developing innovative technologies across Barracuda Networks’ business areas. The team evaluates the threat ecosystem and creates security intelligence to defend Barracuda Networks customers. Barracuda Labs’ threat research areas, which include email, Web, network and cloud security and technology, are designed to improve the world’s security posture by promoting security awareness and education, developing and innovating new defense technologies, and working with government and law enforcement agencies to reduce cybersecurity crime. For more information, please visit www.barracudalabs.com.

About Barracuda Networks Inc.
Barracuda Networks combines premises-based gateways and software, virtual appliances, cloud services, and sophisticated remote support to deliver comprehensive content and network security, data protection and application delivery solutions. The company’s expansive product portfolio includes offerings for protection against email and Web threats as well as products that improve application delivery and network access, message archiving, backup and data protection. Coca-Cola, FedEx, Harvard University, IBM, L’Oreal, and Europcar are among the more than 150,000 organizations protecting their IT infrastructures with Barracuda Networks’ range of affordable, easy-to-deploy and manage solutions. Barracuda Networks is privately held with its International Headquarters in Campbell, Calif. For more information, please visit www.barracudanetworks.com.

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Posted in Internet Security Tips, phishing, Research, Security, Social Networking, Statistics, Web Security | No Comments »

How your facebook password was stolen, and why

Monday, December 19th, 2011

by Dave Michmerhuizen & Luis Chapetti – Security Researchers

Here’s something we hear regularly at Barracuda Labs…

“My mom called me and said that someone posted something bad on her facebook. How did they do that? What should I tell her?”

Our two-part answer is simple. First, mom probably clicked on something and unwittingly gave it permission to post to her wall. Second, there is always a possibility that mom had her password stolen. She should change her Facebook password at once, as well as change the password on any service where she might have used that same password.

Facebook passwords do get stolen. Below is one example of how that happens.

It starts with a message like this one that spreads from one wall to another.

Clicking on the link in the message opens up what looks like a Facebook login page.

(click to open full-size image)

Facebook will pop up a login page in certain situations to make certain that you are properly authenticated. In this case the login page is entirely fake and is not part of Facebook at all.

Suppose you were in a hurry and didn’t take time to look at the URL of the page. If you fill in your information and press the Login button, here’s what happens:

(click for full-size image)

As you can see in the image, your exact username and password are sent off to the Russian domain. Once this is done, the browser is sent to a Facebook themed ‘survey’ site.

(click for full-size image)

These ‘survey’ sites offer some gift in exchange for participating in an endless cycle of marketing schemes, many of which ask for personal information and none of which ever deliver the the promised gift.

The remaining question is why criminals steal Facebook passwords

and there are three good answers.

1. Personal information on your Facebook account can be used to piece together full-fledged identity theft.

2. A stolen Facebook account is the perfect vehicle for carrying out the Stranded Traveler scam.

3. Survey scammers such as the ones shown here have to start their viral campaigns somewhere, and a stolen account, with its hundreds of trusting friends, is the perfect place to start.

With the new Facebook Timeline rolling out this week, users should be particularly careful with the personal information they make available on their pages. As always, Barracuda Networks recommends that you be cautious with what you click on and change your password regularly as a matter of course.

Posted in Current Events, ID Theft, Social Networking, Spam, Web Security | No Comments »

Do we really want better spam detection on social networks?

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

by Daniel Peck, Research Scientist

The question sounds crazy, especially for someone who’s spent a fair amount of the last year working on making spam and other malicious message detection on social networks better. But we do a disservice to tools geared for protection when we don’t think long term about the consequences of them. Does better spam detection on say twitter for example reduce the total amount of spam that users see, or does it just change the signal to noise ratio?

Websites who’s only content is related to spam didn’t get many hits. This led spammers to move to Search Engine Optimization techniques, which have had a good run are still fairly effective, but more often than not spam sites are full of legitimate content harvested from other sites.

I suspect, and have seen several examples, that the same trend is taking place in social media. We build systems that force spammers to put more “real” content into the stream, so that they don’t immediately out themselves. These fake accounts contain plenty of retweets of popular stories, and shared links on facebook with a bit of “hey, what a great deal on shoes” or “click here to see my naked” thrown in here and there.

Times are changing here too, sharing too many popular things also indicates than an account is a spammer, or at the very least a much less valuable node in the network. So the next step is wholesale copying of real peoples profiles, complete with pictures of their cat, a bizzaro you with everything from your facebook account duplicated on another network, such as tumblr or google+, with an occasional spam or malicious link thrown in. The kind of place where friends will eagerly add you, because everyone needs to be connected to every one of their friends through every medium possible of course, and not think twice about clicking on the malicious link that bizzaro you just shared out.

Besides being quite a blow to the privacy of the accounts being copied, this also reduces the trust that anyone can put into a user, which may not necessarily be a bad thing from a security point of view, are we making a problem that’s cosmically easy to spot for end users, such as the endless number of Nigerian prince scams, morph into something that is much more difficult for the end user to distinguish from real content? Are we moving towards an advertorial world where the signal and the noise are nearly impossible to separate?

When it comes to advanced vulnerability discovery and exploitation techniques I am all for raising the level of discourse and seeing talented researchers raise the bar for attack and defense alike, but with something like this I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s best to keep the bar low with regards to detection/blocking on social media and focus on securing APIs and the data they access, understanding that its better for those with less benevolent intent to pull out a few weak individuals from the herd than to give them incentive to find methods to take the whole.

Posted in SEO Poisoning, Social Networking, Spam, Uncategorized | No Comments »

The more connected the more vulnerable

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

by Daniel Peck, Research Scientist

The Facebook data team released some interesting data a few days ago focusing on the connectedness of their social graph, taking six degrees of Kevin Bacon and looking at how many connections away from each other any two people on the network are. From their research it seems like more than 90% of people on the network are seperated by only four degrees, meaning that any person A has a friend that knows a friend of Person B.

Interesting in and of itself this shows how social networking is used to connect to people with whom you have very little in common, perhaps enjoying similar music, enjoying the same food, or like the same apps/games on Facebook. Something like mini ad-hoc Farmville Fan Clubs. And that is neat, the more connected we are to one another then maybe the more we’ll understand each other.

That said, this amount of connectedness has a price in the realm of trust, especially with regards to anomaly detection and behavioral classifying. The network doesn’t distinguish the levels of trust/friendship that we have in the real world. This is likely a neccessary level of abstraction, and we don’t have a leaderboard of friends trust levels, but you have an internal model that allows you to weigh “truths” differently based on whether it came from a long time friend versus someone you met because you attended a one day class together. Software can’t know these levels, at least not without an unreasonable level of training from the user, so for the purposes of behavioral classification it has to use more derived variables, like connectedness, on the social graph. As this collapses these variables become less valuable, and may introduce false levels of trust within your real circle of friends. We’ve seen this become increasingly popular with spammers working through fake accounts. Usually the steps go something like this:

An account is created with a profile listing that they went to “Generic State U”
A few friend requests are sent to others within the “Generic State U” ad-hoc group and with a relatively high level of certainty a few will accept.
The spammer then has a foothold into that persons network, and each “friend” request they send out has more legitimacy
Your real friends are wishing these fake accounts “happy birthday” and commenting on their latest picture uploads, and occasionally having malware spreading links dropped into their feed.

This level of trust via degree connectedness leads to a sort of herd vulnerability. Each malicious account that gains a foothold on the network, means all users of the network are much more vulnerable. The extra few seconds that you take to verify a friend connection, even if you aren’t worried about privacy issues or spam yourself, helps protect less savy users and keeps some of the easiest computations for behavioral analysis effective and the network as a whole a bit less dangerous for the weaker members.

Posted in Internet Security Tips, Social Networking, Spam, Statistics | No Comments »

Barracuda Networks Turns ‘Follows’ and ‘Likes’ into Meals for Children in Need

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

By: Barracuda Labs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Content Security Leader Challenges World with “Clicks for Meals” to Fight Hunger and Provide 10,000 Meals this Holiday Season

Campbell, Calif. (November 30, 2011) – In an effort to combat world hunger, Barracuda Networks is challenging the world to help provide 10,000 meals for hungry children this holiday season. From November 30 until December 31, Barracuda Networks’ new one-for-one campaign−outlined at www.barracuda.com/clicksformeals−offers three free, simple ways everyone can help donate meals to starving children around the world.

Barracuda Networks will provide one meal for each of the following:

Install Profile Protector for Facebook and Twitter. Profile Protector, available at www.profileprotector.com, is a free tool that analyzes and blocks malicious activity on Facebook and Twitter.
Follow @barracudalabs on Twitter. Barracuda Labs is the threat research team who created Profile Protector and reports at www.barracudalabs.com.
“Like” Barracuda Networks on Facebook.

“We spend a lot of time analyzing how attackers use social networks for bad−stealing identities, creating fake profiles, spreading malware and so forth,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer of Barracuda Networks. “We want to use the social networks to do some good. What better way to do that than to use the power and ease of Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and money to fight hunger.”

Barracuda Networks will work with the United Nations World Food Programme to fulfill the meal donation as they continue to fight hunger worldwide. Additional information–including a one-minute video–about the campaign is available at www.barracuda.com/clicksformeals.

“Attackers have proven time and again the enormous opportunity social networks create for malicious activity online,” continued Judge. “This initiative is a small token and acknowledgement of our continued fight to keep social networks safe and make an impact on thousands of children’s lives around the world.”

About Barracuda Profile Protector
Barracuda Profile Protector is a free service that protects social networking users against malicious threats on Facebook and Twitter. The application analyzes user-generated content posted to profiles and is able to block or remove malicious or suspicious content. This includes malicious URLs, embedded photos and/or videos on Facebook and Twitter pages and news feeds. Users can install Profile Protector at www.profileprotector.com.

Posted in Current Events, Social Networking | No Comments »

Seven Annoying Attacks That Facebook Misses

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

This week Facebook experienced a rash of attacks that posted pornographic images. Some even claimed to be nude celebrities and others claimed to be child pornography. Last month we released survey results that showed that 40% of Facebook users do not feel safe on Facebook. Two weeks later, Facebook released an infographic showing its security initiatives and statistics. We applaud the efforts; however, more is needed. When you are trying to grow a social network as well as increase advertising revenue, security becomes not only a lower priority but sometimes a conflict of interest.

Facebook claims that only 0.5% of users experience spam on any given day. That is still 4 million people out of the 400 million users that log in on any given day. We suspect that measurement only counts spam that Facebook catches which is clearly not 100% of the spam. While working on Profile Protector and other web security intelligence, we regularly come across examples of spam and attacks that repeatedly use simliar approaches that are detectable. We compiled this list of seven annoying attacks that Facebook misses.

1) Fake Product Pages:

Knock off luxury goods have always been popular scams. You might think you are buying your mother a nice new purse for a great price. If you actually get the product, which is a bit of a long shot, you are likely to find that the quality you expected from the brand is lacking at best. Facebook is rife with pages promoting these goods. Somehow these pages remain long-lived even after user complaints. Once they finally are shut down there are already 8 duplicate pages running the same scam. Clearly there are some brands that just are not sitting on hundreds of photo albums on Facebook as their advertising platform. For example, Christian Louboutin, Louis Vuitton, Air Jordan and Beats By Dre.

2) Manipulated Accounts Recommendations:

On social networks those with less good motives have figured out how to game the recommendation system and use it to their advantage. This is very similar to how attackers have used search engine optimization to promote their malware. Friends are recommended in a variety of ways, but a simply exploited example is through shared apps. Spammer accounts sign up for the same popular apps that real users do and before too long they are showing up in your list of recommended friends, which snowballs nicely into giving them a foothold into the recommended list for each of your friends.

3) Affiliate Spam:

Affiliate spam is a bigger and bigger part of the typical users incoming stream. Usually relying on the images of established and trusted brands these scams tend to be very successful and take little work for those who run them. The hook is usually a free gift card or in some cases something as extravagant as a new iPad. They encourage or require the user to share it out to all their friends and say something like “I love olive garden” before being redirected to a never-ending series of offers in the form of premium text messaging, video rental and reoccurring subscriptions of all kinds that the user is required to sign up for to get the supposed “free” gift card. A run featuring a Starbucks gift card was successful enough that Starbucks corporate had to comment letting users know it was not legitimate.

4) Photo Tagging For Spam:

The Facebook infographic referenced above mentions “Photo DNA” but it is likely that this is little more than a database of hashes related to explicit and exploitative images. Photo tagging for spamming is one of the most popular methods of spamming through the network but it doesn’t seem to be getting much attention. With each image uploaded a spammer can tag as many 50 other accounts in a photo, and have as many as 200 photos in an album. With everyone in Facebook having a maximum of 5,000 friends each photo can reach a quarter million people. This leads to a fairly nice multiplier for bytes uploaded vs users reached, especially on a network that people spend as much time on as Facebook. Some basic image analysis will tell you if there are really 40 people in the picture or if it just a pair of Hello Kitty heels.

5) Fake Apps

Fake apps, malicious apps, misleading apps, whatever you want to call it, Facebook is overflowing with them. New examples show up daily, often focusing on giving users features that they wish Facebook would provide. After all, don’t we all want to know if that old flame still looks you up every few days. Or don’t we all wait for the launch of a ‘dislike’ button. It is a big network and these are going to exist from time to time anywhere, but it is becoming more like the shareware sites of the late 90s where most the programs were of low quality and a relatively high percentage of them posed a risk. Usually they are in the information gathering and spamming business, but we have found examples that link to malicious binaries.

6) Stolen Pictures

There is not really a set of sextuplets each with the same bikini picture as their personal profile picture. Those are fake accounts. The photo album that as the same two images-one of the front view of a bikini and the other with the back view of a different bikini-repeated 15 times each is not a real user. Certainly there are some images that will be common to multiple people such as a team logo or newly released album cover. However the fake accounts typically use images of a salacious nature. Sex sells, and these profiles do very well at gathering followers around a fake identity, only to occasionally slip an advertisement into the stream. Of course there is always the possibility that we’ve stumbled upon a set of identical sextuplets that would be very happy to reconnect…

7) Anomalous Behavior

Finally, Facebook and social networks in general should focus on some form of anomaly detection. We’ve all seen examples of that friend who you never really talk to, and probably weren’t that interested in “friending” anyway, posting on your wall or messaging your account encouraging you get a free iPad or a trip on Southwest airlines, etc. Similar problems have been appropriately mitigated elsewhere in messaging but social networks have a long way to go. In many ways we’re seeing the same problems that the security community has been dealing with for more than a decade. Instead of SMTP and a distributed network, more and more messaging is pushed over HTTP and closed networks that give the receiver little that they can do in the way of securing themselves. Looking for behavior that is an outlier to the normal pattern is a well understood approach in other areas of network and messaging security. If someone that never uses chat is suddenly chatting with dozens of people and forwarding the same link, then there is a high likelihood of suspicious activity.

Posted in Current Events, Internet Security Tips, Research, Security, Social Networking, Spam | No Comments »

Barracuda Labs Releases 2011 Social Networking Security and Privacy Study

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

By: Barracuda Labs

For Immediate Release

NINE OUT OF 10 PEOPLE ATTACKED AND ONE OUT OF FIVE PEOPLE DAMAGED BY PRIVACY LAPSE ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

Barracuda Labs Releases 2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study

View the Infographic – http://www.barracudalabs.com/SNS

View the Report – http://www.barracudalabs.com/SNSreport

Campbell, Calif. (Oct. 12, 2011) – Barracuda Labs today released its 2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study. The complete study and infographic can be seen at www.barracudalabs.com. Barracuda Labs is the research arm of Barracuda Networks Inc., the leading provider of security, application delivery and data protection solutions to businesses.

“Social networks are a significant part of how we communicate with one another. At the same time, the dangers associated with social networking have climbed exponentially,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and vice president for Barracuda Networks. “The fact that nine out of 10 users already have been attacked proves that attackers are taking over social networks and users are living in fear.”

The study focuses on social networking usage, security and privacy, and is based on survey results from hundreds of users representing over 20 countries. The study was conducted over a two-week span between September and October 2011. Overall, users value security and privacy almost equally to popularity and ease of use. Major highlights from the study are included below.

Social Networking Usage

LinkedIn is the most accepted social network by businesses with only 20 percent of companies blocking or limiting its usage, as compared to 31 percent of companies that block or limit Facebook.

Social Networking Security

Nine out of 10 people have received spam, and one in four have received a virus or malware, on a social network.

Social Networking Privacy

One in five people has been negatively affected by information that was exposed on a social network.

2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study – Resources:

Infographic – http://www.barracudalabs.com/SNS

Report – http://www.barracudalabs.com/SNSreport

About Barracuda Labs

Barracuda Labs is a global multi-disciplinary research and threat analysis team that fulfills a critical role in developing innovative technologies across Barracuda Networks’ business areas. Barracuda Labs’ threat research areas include email, Web, network and cloud security and technology. Barracuda Labs aims to improve the world’s security posture by promoting security awareness and education, developing and innovating new defense technologies, and working with government and law enforcement agencies to reduce cybersecurity crime.

About Barracuda Networks

Barracuda Networks Inc. combines premises-based gateways and software, virtual appliances, cloud services, and sophisticated remote support to deliver comprehensive content security, data protection and application delivery solutions. The company’s expansive product portfolio includes offerings for protection against email and Web threats, as well as products that improve application delivery and network access, message archiving, backup and data protection. Coca-Cola, FedEx, Harvard University, IBM, L’Oreal, and Europcar are among the more than 150,000 organizations protecting their IT infrastructures with Barracuda Networks’ range of affordable, easy-to-deploy and manage solutions. Barracuda Networks is privately held with its International headquarters in Campbell, Calif. For more information, please visit www.barracudanetworks.com.

Posted in ID Theft, phishing, Research, Security, Social Networking, Spam, Statistics | No Comments »

Spam Legitimacy Through Url Redirection

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

by Daniel Peck, Research Scientist

Usually relegated to little more than page filler on vulnerability assessment reports, open URL redirection is a vulnerability that doesn’t usually affect the site owner, but can be leveraged to add a sense of false legitimacy to spam and phishing links going through it. This is nothing new in the world of spam, but we haven’t seen a lot of it in social network spam until recently. What usually is easy for moderately savvy users to detect becomes much more difficult when shared through a Facebook link, which as we’ve seen before is trivial for malicious types to create with “likejacking” when an unsuspecting user visits their page.

In this particular case the spammer is leveraging an open redirect on news.bbc.co.uk, a site that most users would see as trustworthy to redirects to a site that is far from legitimate. It seems to only be being used to push users towards the typical affiliate spam that we often see with social network scams, but similar approaches could be very successful in a more malicious context. While it does not solve the redirection issue, one way to avoid the viral spread of these scams is to log out of social media sites like Facebook when you aren’t using them, as then you will be prompted to login if the page tries to post to your account. For more savvier users browser add-ons such as ShareMeNot and NoScript can be used to block access to Facebook resources from sites other than Facebook. From a developer perspective, to make sure that your sites aren’t being used to add false trust to spam campaigns redirects should be validated, and limited as much as possible through a list of whitelisted urls that are allowed to be redirected to, or an intermediary page advising the user of the redirection. For more information the the type of vulnerability itself and mitigations check out this great post from Googles Webmaster Central Blog.

Posted in Social Networking, Spam | No Comments »

Google+ Gets a “+1″ for Browser Security

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

by Ray Kelly, Manager of Client Side Technologies

Launching a new Web app today comes with a few certainties, and one of them is, “I will be a target for hackers” for sure. So when an app as large and as high profile as Google+ launches, it will surely be one of the top targets for malicious activity. This happened to Facebook the more popular it grew and it still is a favorite platform for malicious activity. I did some analysis of the HTTP traffic between Google+ and the browser and found that Google is off to a good start in regards to browser security. Below are several take-aways:

Only SSL!
All Google+ traffic is sent over SSL and non SSL is not even an option. This protects users’ traffic from getting sniffed and their sessions from being hijacked. It is good to know that Google understands that sensitive information is being shared and SSL is really the only option for transmitting data.

Secure Headers
Here is what a typical response looks like from Google+:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 184942 Set-Cookie: ULS=somehash; Path=/; Secure; HttpOnly Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:29:05 GMT Expires: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:29:05 GMT Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block Server: GSE
There are a few headers in this response that are specific to browser security, for example:

Set-Cookie Secure – This tells the browser to only send cookies over a secure (SSL) connection. So if the site happens to hit a page that is not SSL, then the cookie will not be sent.

Set-Cookie HttpOnly – This prevents the cookie from being accessed by client side script.

Both of these cookie attributes help to prevent session hijacking by only sending cookies when appropriate.

X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff – This prevents “mime” based attacks. The header instructs the browser not to override the response content type. For example, some browsers try to be smart by deciding for themselves if the content is really is text/html or an image. So with the nosniff option, if the server says the content is text/html, then the browser needs to render it as text/html.

X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN – This tells the browser to only render frame pages from the URL hosting the main page. This prevents Clickjacking attacks against the user. Clickjacking is a browser-based attack that tricks the user into clicking on one thing but then performs a different action, such as following a user on Twitter.

X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block – This allows the browser to detect a cross site reflection attack. If the browser sees a potential reflection attack, it will prevent the page from rendering in the browser. Instead, you will see something similar to this depending on the browser:

What about Facebook?
While these preventions are by no means ground breaking or new, the fact that Google is thinking about and using them is a good step. In contrast, let’s look at a typical Facebook response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: public, max-age=604800 Content-Type: application/x-javascript; charset=utf-8 Expires: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:46:37 GMT P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p" X-Frame-Options: DENY Set-Cookie: _e_syaN_0=deleted; expires=Thu, 01-Jan-1970 00:00:01 GMT; path=/; domain=.facebook.com; httponly X-FB-Server: 10.52.238.45 X-Cnection: close Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:46:37 GMT Content-Length: 24032

It is surprising that Facebook has not taken the same simple precautions that Google+ has taken. Here, we can see the differences:

	Secure Cookie	Nosniff	XSS Protection	X-Frame	HttpOnly Cookie	SSL
Google+	Yes	Yes	Yes	Sameorigin	Yes	Yes
Facebook	No	No	No	Deny	Yes	Optional and not default

In fact, just yesterday Microsoft’s Vulnerability Research team released advisory MSVR11-007: “Clickjacking Vulnerability in Facebook.com Could Allow Account Compromise”. According to the advisory, Facebook has resolved the issue. I did another check of the headers and still did not see any change to the response. It is possible that Facebook closed the hole on the server side with input validation in order to prevent the malicious data from entering their database, but they still did not implement the simple browser precautions that Google+ has. Here is the link to the official MSVR advisory:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/msvr11-007.mspx

The folks from SecTheory/WhiteHat Security have an excellent write-up on Clickjacking. For detailed information on this vulnerability visit:
http://www.sectheory.com/clickjacking.htm

Conclusion
Unfortunately, not all of these headers are supported in all browsers, meaning any of you still using IE6 won’t be able to take advantage of these headers. What’s this mean for you? Make sure you are using an up-to-date browser to take full advantage of these protections.

Do these security measures make Google+ impervious to malicious activities? Absolutely not. Is it a good start? Yes, it is. And further, it is good to see an app make its debut with security in mind. It actually gives us Infosec folks a bit of hope that developers are listening and doing the right thing.

Tags: Facebook, Google+, Internet Security, Security, social networking security, Web Security
Posted in Internet Security Tips, Research, Security, Social Networking, Web Security | 9 Comments »

Fake Google+ invites used to harvest Facebook profiles

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

by David Michmerhuizen – Security Researcher

A common denominator of Facebook scams is that they offer you something you can’t resist. Whether it be free Farmville coins, a ‘Dislike’ button, or just a girl in a short plaid skirt, if it’s desirable then you’ll eventually see it offered on Facebook as part of a scam.

And so it is with the latest must-have digital chotchka, an invitation to the new social networking offering from Google, Google+. Since Google’s new project is aimed squarely at Facebook you would hardly expect to see such invitations offered on Facebook, but that’s where they’re showing up

Google Plus invite in Facebook news feed

Clicking on one of these news feed items brings up an actual Facebook application page. These app pages are being taken down by Facebook and scammers are creating new ones, as seen here:

Facebook fake Google plus invite application

The reason for selecting an application for this scam is that applications can, if allowed, access otherwise private information from your Facebook profile. That’s just what this app does. Clicking on any of these links takes you to a page where the application requests permission to access your Facebook data, and it really does ask for quite a bit

Permissions request

This appears to be the entire point of this scam – email and account data harvesting. The only other thing the application does is to spread to your friends. First you are asked to ‘Like’ the app, which will cause it to appear in your friends’ news feeds.

"Like" step

Then, just in case items from you don’t appear in your friends’ news feeds, there is one more step: you are asked to explicitly send “invites” to your friends.

Fake "invite" step

Instead of actually sending invites, you’re sending Facebook requests that will appear in the notification queue of each friend you select.

Once you are past this point you wind up on the Google+ home page, and when you try to log in – surprise – you haven’t been invited.

As always, we at Barracuda Networks recommend that you approach any wall post that appears in your news feed with great caution. If they seem to be too good to be true, double-check with the person whose name appears on the post. Additionally, Barracuda Web Filters give IT departments the ability to selectively block Facebook within the organization.

Posted in Internet Security Tips, Social Networking, Web Security | No Comments »

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