security – Page 9 – text/plain

Attack Techniques: Priming Attacks on Legitimate Sites

Earlier today, we looked at two techniques for attackers to evade anti-phishing filters by using lures that are not served from http and https urls that are subject to reputation analysis. A third attack technique is to send a lure that entices a user to visit a legitimate site and perform an unsafe operation onContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Priming Attacks on Legitimate Sites”

Attack Techniques: Phishing via Mailto

Earlier today, we looked at a technique where a phisher serves his attack from the user’s own computer so that anti-phishing code like SmartScreen and SafeBrowsing do not have a meaningful URL to block. A similar technique is to encode the attack within a mailto URL, because anti-phishing scanners and email clients rarely apply reputationContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Phishing via Mailto”

TLS Certificate Verification Changes in Edge

Last Updated August 21 2023: When establishing a secure HTTPS connection with a server, a browser must validate that the certificate sent by the server is valid — that is to say, that: In the past, Chromium running on Windows delegated this validation task to APIs in the operating system, layering a minimal set ofContinue reading “TLS Certificate Verification Changes in Edge”

Mark-of-the-Web: Additional Guidance

I’ve been writing about Windows Security Zones and the Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) security primitive in Windows for decades now, with 2016’s Downloads and MoTW being one of my longer posts that I’ve updated intermittently over the last few years. If you haven’t read that post already, you should start there. Advice for Implementers At this point,Continue reading “Mark-of-the-Web: Additional Guidance”

HTTPS Goofs: Forgetting the Bare Domain

As I mentioned, the top failure of HTTPS is failing to use it, and that’s particularly common in in-bound links sent via email, in newsletters, and the like. Unfortunately, there’s another common case, whereby the user simply types your bare domain name (example.com) in the browser’s address bar without specifying https:// first. For decades, manyContinue reading “HTTPS Goofs: Forgetting the Bare Domain”