By Jacques Erasmus

This time of year, those of us in information security become wary of crafty criminals leveraging the winter holidays to prey on our employees’ lack of awareness online in a number of ways. All it takes is for one Trojan to infect a single PC in a company to put an entire infrastructure at risk.

Everyone plays a role in protecting the assets and information of their organization. To help explain what this means for you as an IT manager, an employee or even a home user, we have developed a two-part primer on common threats you may encounter on a daily basis that might pose a risk to you or your company’s infrastructure.

We begin today with part one: Web-based attacks.

From a security awareness point of view, these threats are much harder to spot due to the manner in which they operate. However, this discussion will help you better understand how they work and to know when these attacks take place.

Below is a picture of what the common workflow is for a web-based threat. In the last few years, exploit frameworks have exploded onto the scene as the de-facto way to accumulate many users in a short period of time. The diagram below tries to detail the basic workflow of these to improve your understanding of how you might get infected.

In this example, a user might be using Search to find information on a hot topic such as the iPhone 4S and browse to a website that is totally legitimate. The website, however, might be compromised by a hacker exploiting an outdated or vulnerable version of some package the site is leveraging — let’s use WordPress as an example. A botnet may be used to crawl Search data and popular terms to find websites running vulnerable versions of WordPress. If a blog or website is found that meets this criteria, an IFrame will be injected into the site pointing to the hacker’s exploit server. When you browse to this website, your browser loads the content of the IFrame which, in the background, creates a session to the exploit framework that will in turn try to infect you while you are on a website you assume is safe.

Then, the exploit server, or ‘framework’ in this case, looks for out-of-date versions of popular third party applications such as Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash, Quicktime, Media Player, Java (JRE), Webex and a myriad of other applications that may be running on your machine. Third party applications are now a massive vector for attack — in my opinion, bigger than Windows operating system exploits.

How do companies protect against this?

The first step is ensuring that all systems are patched — not just Windows and Office applications updates, but also the auxiliary apps that run on your desktops and laptops. IT departments need to perform regular and rigorous patching.

But that’s not all. Cases exist where a patch does not exist for a particular vulnerability. To circumvent this, IT admins should implement a layered defense system where protection is running on the desktop and layered defenses on the gateway to filter these attacks. Additional monitoring to correlate network forensics into our array of tools to detect these exploits and attacks is also a good idea.

As an employee, the important thing to remember is to be vigilant and report anything suspicious to your IT department. The more disciplined you are on what to look for in a scam, the less potential there is for a company-wide breach of security.

Please stay tuned for part two of this awareness series: email-borne threats.