Page 37 - Cyber Warnings December 2015

Fortunately, some websites are unlocking their platforms to allow consumers to delete their profiles.
Also, anti tracking solutions from companies like PrivatizeMe, keep user’s browsing and search
history from being tracked by e-stalkers is now available.

How does advertising related tracking affect corporate information security?

With the risk of cyber-theft and data loss on the rise, corporate security personnel have focused on
securing their applications and networks, firewalls and intrusion detection, without much attention to
browser related trackers.

With employees bringing their own devices to work and using corporate laptops, increasing a larger
share of the corporate employees browse and search using public networks at cafes and airports as
well as home networks that lack sophisticated firewalls.

As they surf the Internet, visit sites and see ads, they are tracked by thousands of sites, including
third parties. A device used “in the wild” brings all of this and more when connected to the
corporate network.

This is where the trouble begins: some bad actors may partner with unwitting websites or may
introduce trackers embedded in ads into user devices. These bad actors could include competitors,
sovereign governmental spies, identity hijackers and even intellectual property thieves.

Imagine if some bad actor placed trackers in ads on popular websites. These ads are usually
served by third party ad platforms. They can introduce these trackers onto user machines as users
go about surfing popular websites and view or click on these ads.

Over time bad actors can track tens of thousands of users. Assume for a moment your company
employs a few of these users and the bad actor wants to infiltrate your company.
They can use the trackers and the company IP address to target specific users and set up
honeypots or info sites to lure these targets. These honeypots may be informational sites with work
related topics, such as white papers, that may be of interest to the targeted users.

The white papers could introduce sleeper malware into the user’s devices designed activate behind
the corporate firewall to infiltrate your network.

Another technique is to craft targeted malicious advertisements. These maladvertisements may be
directed at specifically targeted users using standard ad targeting or techniques described above.
Published reports show well-known sites such as Drudge Report, Yahoo and Google’s DoubleClick
have served maladvertisements in 2015.

This sleeper malware may activate itself once the user is inside the corporate network to case it.
Over time this may result in data loss resulting in identity theft or even intellectual property theft.

We recommend corporate network administrators deploy products or trusted services that thwarts
e-stalking by untrusted sites yet enables meaningful ads on all employee devices. Corporate

37 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2015 Edition
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