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How popular websites are at risk of malicious activity

Data61, the data and data specialist arm of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, found out that around half of the Internet’s popular websites are at risk of malicious activity.

This is caused by their dependence on a chain of other third parties to import external resources, which are often required to properly load content.

These external resources include ad providers, tracking and analytics services, and content distribution networks.

Researching ‘trustability’

According to a recent press release, the researchers question the ‘trustability’ of websites and quantify the extent to which the trust model of today’s World Wide Web is fundamentally broken.

Research showed that the aforementioned third parties can further load resources from other domains creating a dependency chain of up to over 30 domains, underpinned by a form of implicit trust with the original website.

The research discovered that the larger the dependency chain, the greater the threat to malicious activity.

The Information Security and Privacy research leader at CSIRO’s Data61 and Scientific Director of Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub explained that although this is a well-known web design decision, often overlooked are its implications on security and privacy.

Third parties

He added that almost all websites today are heavily embedded with tracking components.

For every website visited, a person could be unknowingly loading content from potentially malicious parties and leaving a trail of their internet activity.

JavaScript, which is a popular web resource generally used to improve the user experience of the web, represents the greatest risk of malicious activity as they are designed to be executed undetected.

The potential threat should not be underestimated, as suspicious content loaded on browsers can open the way to further exploits including Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which disrupt traffic to websites; and ransomware campaigns, which cost the world more than US$ 8 billion in 2018.

Unfortunately, the original or the ‘first party’ websites have little to no visibility of where these resources are coming from.

Security measures

This causes lack of ‘trustability’ of content on the web, and the need to better regulate the web by introducing standardised security measures and the notion of explicit trust.

A plethora of solutions is needed to resolve the security issue created by dependency chains. These are:

  1. Additional research
  2. Support of the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the predominant organisation focused on developing web standards
  3. Web ‘hypergiants’

In the meantime, users can install simple web browser extensions such as ad- and JavaScript-blockers to limit exposure to malicious activity through the web.

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Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

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SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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