Unmasking “Canonical” Hacks
As a follow up to the recent Matt Cutt’s tweet and blog post about emerging rel=canonical hacks, I did a detailed guest post on StopBadware blog about this problem.
In that article, I wrote about how such hacks work and how cyber-criminals can use this hard-to-detect attack to hijack search results of compromised sites. You can also find a short review of a real “rel=canonical” attack that affected quite a few websites.
As always, I wrote about tools and techniques that can help you diagnose hacks that try to make Google think that your site has moved to a new domain name. Unfortunately, at this point no tools that I know of specifically check for rogue “rel=canonical” instructions. However, more universal file integrity monitoring solutions can be really efficient as they will inform about any unexpected modifications.
Continue (how Unmask Parasites reveals rel=canonical hacks) »»
1 Million Pages Checked by Unmask Parasites!
1 Million web pages have been checked by Unmask Parasites since July 1, 2008.
167,033 of them were found suspicious for one reason or another.
This happened on December 5, 2010 around 00:00 GMT.
Looking forward for the second million :)
Happy 2nd Birthday, Unmask Parasites!
Unmask Parasites turns two years old today!
A year ago I posted some statistics. Let’s compare the first two years.
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Introduction to Website Parasites
Wikipedia defines Parasitism as a “type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species in which one, the parasite, benefits from a prolonged, close association with the other, the host, which is harmed.”
This definition perfectly describes relationships between hackers and legitimate websites. As it often happens in real life, the host (legitimate website and its owner) may be completely unaware of parasites until the harmful effect becomes obvious (e.g. drops in traffic, lost search engine rankings, site gets blacklisted, etc. ). And it doesn’t matter how big or small your site is and how malicious the hack is – this is the sort of relationships where parasites (hackers) always win and legitimate websites always lose.
As a webmaster, you can be more effective at detecting and mitigating parasitic activities if you know how hackers can benefit from your site .
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Round up of Unmask Parasites Improvements
In the last couple of months of 2009 I quitely rolled out some improvements to Unmask Parasites. I couldn’t find enough time to blog about them since there always had been some nasty malware attack that I needed to investigate and write about here. Finally, I decided that the new year beginning is the proper time to round up some improvements and new features of the last year.
Round up »»
54F3 Ads on Unmask Parasites Site
As you know, Unmask Parasites is a free independent service. And I hope it will always be free. However, to be able to pay my bills, I placed Google’s contextual ads on this site.
I think, Google AdSense worked well for me (not great though). I didn’t have to search for sponsors – Google picked the most relevant ads from their vast advertizing network for me. The ads are almost guaranteed to be safe (you know, some ad networks fail to detect banners that contain malicious code). And the earnings were enough to pay for the site hosting and domain names (these are the only direct expenses I have).
This month, as an experiment, I decided to accept Jason Remillard’s offer and replaced AdSense block at the top of Unmask Parasites report pages with a banner of his 54f3.com service.
Continue »»
Happy Birthday Unmask Parasites!
Exactly one year ago I purchased the UnmaskParasites.com domain name and made the first early beta version of my new service available for public testing.
One year later Unmask Parasites is still in beta but now it’s a much more mature service that has proven its viability.
Many interesting things happened during this year. I’m not a good writer to make it an interesting reading, so I’ll only list some milestones, facts and statistics here.
Continue »»
Security Issues With the Blog
Yesterday, I had been notified that my blog’s web pages sometimes contain malicious scripts. I had to shut down the blog and investigate the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience. I didn’t want to expose you to any threats.
The Unmask Parasites online service was not affected (it is hosted in a different location, and is very secure). It worked all that time. And during the investigation, my blog redirected visitors to http://www.UnmaskParasites.com
Continue »»
New Version of Unmask Parasites Released
Happy Chinese New Year!
I’ve got a new version of Unmask Parasites. It’s a free online tool that helps site owners reveal hidden security problems. Hope you will like it.
Safe Browsing Integration.
The major new feature is the integration with Google’s Safe Browsing project. Now examined links and all referenced domains are checked against Google’s blacklist. It’s the same list that Firefox 3, Safari and Google Chrome use.
The results will clearly indicate whether a page links to suspicious sites (bad neighborhoods) or generates security warnings in Google’s search results and in popular modern web browsers. Continue »»
About this blog
Occasional posts from the developer of
Unmask Parasites about things that hackers already know and site owners should know (if they don't want to be victims).
Exploit reviews, security tips, and all that jazz.
