
Stealing sensitive information by using pixels of ad banners - shandor
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/07/for-two-years-criminals-stole.html
======
grx
> These networks aggressively scan advertisers' javascript for suspicious code

How is Javascript that (a) reads parts of a binary file to build a new routine
or (b) does silent redirects to TinyUrl NOT suspicious?! What are they looking
for in these cases?

------
devoply
It's not that clever even. It's quite awesome that someone can go in there
without any knowledge of the situation and figure this stuff out though. But
writing the original code is trivial. The idea seems trivial too. They should
have used stenography if they did not.

~~~
shandor
Yeah, but actually the easier the exploit the more concerning this kind of
stuff is. I mean if we can't even trump the easy stuff, how about the more
sophisticated attacks?

~~~
devoply
Well yeah that's the interesting part the exploit is simple, but finding it is
difficult. Which is very interesting. It's like the intelligence problem.
Where hard stuff is easier than the simple stuff. I guess in the future we
will scan for whether the js file is trying to read any other file which
should put a stop to this sort of thing.

------
ephextom
Recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129029)

