Let’s Unmask Parasites

Hi,

My name is Denis Sinegubko. I’m the developer of Unmask Parasites. It’s a free online service that scans web pages for hidden illicit content such as invisible spam links and iframes, redirects and suspicious scripts.

This service was released as an early public beta in the beginning of July and has since gone through numerous improvements. It’s still a beta, but it works well with most sites and proved to be a really useful tool for website security issues investigations. After all, Gmail is still a beta too!

To test Unmask Parasites and learn more about real life website security problems, this summer I joined the StopBadware.org discussion group. I tried to check every request and help web site owners find out why their sites were blacklisted by Google and Firefox. This was an exciting experience. Every week I learned some new tricks hackers used to exploit web sites and hide their malicious code.

Thanks to regular posts of Google Anti-Malware Team members, I gained some valuable knowledge about their automated security scanners and Safe Browsing Diagnostics reports (which may be really confusing sometimes). This helps to make decisions on what could have led to the ban and what couldn’t.

As I learned more and more, I realized how little regular website owners know about security threats, anti-hacker protection and how to find out if their sites have already been compromised.

And the worst news for site owners is it is not only between them and their visitors. Google immediately “punishes” web sites as soon as it detects malicious behavior. As a result, such sites are deprived of Google’s search traffic, AdWords campaigns are suspended and most users of Firefox 3 and Google Chrome browsers won’t be able to visit the sites.

The ones that are hurt the most are owners of small sites who usually have neither special knowledge nor budgets to prevent, detect, and withstand hacker attacks. It’s very frustrating for them to find out that Google and Firefox are trying to ruin their small business or hobby sites for no obvious reason by calling them “attack sites” and keeping web surfers away.

So I decided to start this blog and share some down-to-earth information about web site exploits. I.e. what web site exploits look like, how and why web sites are getting compromised, how to find and remove malicious code if a web site has been hacked. Of course, I’ll be also blogging about my own tools: Unmask Parasites and the ones that haven’t been released yet (stay tuned!).

To make this blog more interesting, I encourage you to ask questions and suggest topics that you want me to cover. I’ll also accept guest posts and real life stories – anything about website security and cleaning up compromised web sites. Just leave your comments or contact me directly via a web form.

If this sounds interesting to you, it’s time to subscribe to the RSS feed. Or follow me on Twitter if you prefer short message format.

Let’s unmask parasites!

Related posts:

• Unmask Parasites. A Year of Blogging.
• Happy Birthday Unmask Parasites!