Web threats ..a new wave! – by Hemanshu

Today omnipresence of internet makes your browser the favorite attack vector for bad guys. Initially content filtering solutions (think websense) looked effective in curbing malicious website, but of recent there has been a new revival in the malicious websites and what is interesting is more and more legitimate websites are getting infected(msn canda , nitie ,Bank-of-India). Once a legitimate site starts distributing malware or is compromised there is little your web filtering solution or firewall could do about it. To add to injury attackers have now turned to obfuscate the attack payload to evade any security apparatus like IPS in place. Javascript looks like to be the tool of choice; its universally supported in all browsers (and in pdfs too..but that’s again a long story). Known attacks like Gumbler have started leveraging obfuscation an excellent description is here. These obfuscations make it very hard for signature based security engine to confidently detect and attack.