Scammers Bite Chrome Users With Forgotten 2014 Bug (betanews.com) 35
"Tech support scammers have started exploiting a two-year-old bug in Google Chrome to trick victims into believing their PC is infected with malware," reports security researcher Sophos. It begins by freezing the browser, BrianFagioli reports, sharing an article from Beta News:
These bad guys pose as Microsoft tech support and display an in-browser message that says the user's computer is infected with "Virus Trojan.worm! 055BCCAC9FEC". To make matters worse, Google has apparently known about the exploit for more than two years and simply failed to patch it. "The bug was discovered in Chrome 35 in July 2014 in the history.pushState() HTML5 function, a way of adding web pages into the session history without actually loading the page in question. The developer who reported the issue published code showing how to add so many items into Chrome's history list that the browser would effectively freeze", says Sophos...
"Users can either close Chrome using the Task Manager or, in cases where the browser is using up so much processor power that Task Manager doesn't appear, by rebooting the computer. The chances of encountering this particular scam are small -- it's only been spotted on a single website -- but its existence underlines how small bugs that don't seem terribly important may nevertheless be abused by cybercriminals down the line."
"Users can either close Chrome using the Task Manager or, in cases where the browser is using up so much processor power that Task Manager doesn't appear, by rebooting the computer. The chances of encountering this particular scam are small -- it's only been spotted on a single website -- but its existence underlines how small bugs that don't seem terribly important may nevertheless be abused by cybercriminals down the line."
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Mod up parent. Funny. Never seem to have points when I need them, insane illogical stupid slashdot rating system...
Ho ho ho (Score:1)
Yandex, their Russian competitor was pushing their Yandex Browser with these scamvertisements for years.
How many times you saw this on android? A popunder comes with "Delete viruz in 5..4..3..2..1." and then your phone hangs. If you click on it, it opens that Yandex browser in google market.
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Zero times. Try staying off the Russian porn sites.
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No it's not just porn. Anfd it's not just russia. Basically every video download site . There's a lot of old movies (I love pre '66 movies!) that have gone public, but sleazy video distributers still download them and try to sell them, and if someone tries to post it on youtube, they file a notice, even tho they have no rights to it. The only alternative then becomes one of these doewnload sites like openload or others like it. Complete with virus message. Of course to can do a force quit, but the fact is
Re: Ho ho ho (Score:1)
I want to know why nobody has acknowledged that fake virus infinite redirects served from poison ads are really fricken common. With my Galaxy S3 I got redirects to the app store without touching anything. That was it.
With my Nexus 6p i get random full screen ads that do the ol virus + alert + 9 redirects prior. They look at the user agent to determine I have an Nexus 6p. They look at my ip to determine I'm on Verizon. I bet this is really effective at scaring the less computer illiterate. Again, this is wi
Re: Ho ho ho (Score:1)
This just happened with slashdot. Fullscreen advert taking over the browser. Shame /. Does not vet its own adverts.
Not only cybercriminals, either. (Score:2)
Care to try to explain how all those links to kiddie-porn sites got on your computer in a courtroom?
Why does that function even exist? (Score:1)
How does it benefit the user to let websites push "visited" URLs into a browsers history? I expect my browser's history to only include sites I've actually visited.
Re: Why does that function even exist? (Score:3, Insightful)
Specifically it's for sites or web apps that have changes to pages without navigating to a new URL so the back button will work as expected. Basically for JavaScript laden front ends the hipsters love that leak like crazy and use all your memory and CPU just for a couple tabs.
Re: Why does that function even exist? (Score:4, Interesting)
Specifically it's for sites or web apps that have changes to pages without navigating to a new URL so the back button will work as expected.
Like my.t-mobile.com . It's such an annoying practice... plus sites doing It often don't work correctly in some browsers.
Re:Why does that function even exist? (Score:4, Informative)
Easy - if you click a link on a page and it does an AJAX thing and load up the destination without actually changing the page URL. You see this in webmail - you click your mailbox and the URL doesn't change, but the email opens. Now, you may know to click the X that they put up to close ir, or a back button to go back to the index, but if you click the real browser Back button, what happens? If you're unlucky, it goes to the previous page you visited (or blank tab page).
Using this function lets you pre-load the page into the Back button so if you use the back button, it does the Right Thing and actually goes back to the index as you expect.
The best example of this is GMail - where you have 3 ways of getting back to the index from a message view - you click the arrow, you click the mailbox, OR you click the browser back button. (And the back button may not be physically clicking the button, but using a mapped keyboard or mouse button)
It's because a lot of sites do AJAXy stuff that would otherwise break Back button functionality
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So it seems Google Translate from Russian to English works.
Its not rare. Its very common. (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in tech support for a local managed service provider in a small city. We have several dozen business clients in the region (we don't handle private users). We are not a large operation by any measure. We get at least 2 calls a week about someone's computer having a virus that turns out to be this. Most of the time it seems to come from websites that are typo-squatting. If we are seeing that volume of complaints it can't be rare.
Re: Its not rare. Its very common. (Score:4, Interesting)
At work (Score:2)
We use IE 8 so should be fine ... sheww
HTMl 5 is too scary right now
Got bit by this 2-wks ago at latimes.com (Score:5, Interesting)
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I personally saw this one too. Had to kill Chrome. Wondered what other damage it was doing
The most important thing about a browser is how many features it has. The more the better. Real security would involve winding back HTML5 into something so simple that it could be understood and audited. Never going to happen. And we have come to accept that shipping insecure software and then patching as the bugs are found is the way software works. Nobody is ever upset that the bugs are shipped int the first p
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Let's see, it's either ctrl(or command)-l, ctrl-c, alt-tab-tab-tab, ctrl-l, ctrl-v, enter (six key combinations probably already commited to muscle memory), or installing yet-another-extension (and we already have too many of those to keep track of, don't need another one) AND taking your hands off the keyboard.
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I typically run with two different "users" logged in to Chrome and I have each user on a different monitor. One user is for sites where I want to save credentials and the other is for sites I don't......harder for a site to use Facebook if it's running under a different Chrome session. Because I have two monitors, I've seen an attack similar to the one described in the article, but it was obvious because only one monitor got the "Operating System Error" message.
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............... a reputable site like latimes.com ..........
Not so sure about that.
Other abuses (Score:1)
Can this work for domains other than the one running the script? If so, this sounds pretty nasty, as not only could it be used for scammers, but to seed somebody's internet history with "bad" links. You want to incriminate somebody in viewing illegal images/downloads/etc, just seed their browser history.