Security researcher to do live capture of malware YouTube website

Aug 21, 2014 00:16 GMT  ·  By

Ad networks being abused by cybercrininals to deliver malware to unsuspecting users is still an important issue in 2014, as researchers find evidence of malicious code on YouTube advertising service.

As the industry of advertising is at the core of the web economy, crooks try to find a way to integrate software designed to compromise computers in this massive distribution chain.

Security researchers from Bromium security company, are to present at the Virus Bulletin 2014 conference in Seattle in September a study showing that the networks delivering advertisement content are used for spreading malicious programs to visitors of reputable websites.

In the talk titled “Optimized mal-ops. Hack the ad network like a boss,” Bromium security researchers Rahul Kashyap and Vadim Kotov, will perform live capture of malware uncovered on YouTube.

In the abstract of the presentation they say that “by visiting a website we implicitly allow a number of third-party JavaScript and Flash programs to execute in our browsers and this brings up some huge security concerns.”

Counter-measures against this type of threat and the possibility to detect malicious banners by security crawlers are also to be discussed.

“We try to estimate how vulnerable the somewhat 'opaque' ad-networking industry is, and what countermeasures could be applied to lower the severity of the threats it poses,” they say.

In a recent case of malvertising, Yahoo! Advertising was involved in the distribution chain, the malware delivered being CryptoWall ransomware.