Are you infected with secret ads?
p2pnet news | security:- Some ISPs are looking to increase their cash flows by secretly placing advertisements into web pages. “They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users,” says a recent Slashdot post.
Is this happening a lot? And has it happened to you?
The University of Washington security and privacy research group and ICSI can tell you.
By yesterday they’d found 305 IP addresses with modified pages and determined, “At least 4 ISPs are apparently modifying page content (ie, not an ad-blocking proxy or firewall).”
“By visiting our web page, you are helping out with our experiment,” says the site. “Inn the process, we’ll help you figure out if some ‘party in the middle’ (like your ISP) might be modifying your web content in flight. We also plan to share our overall results with the public.
Every time someone lands on the page, it detectse if a “party in the middle” is modifying a set of test web pages, and the results of the tests are shown immediately.
“If you do not see a ‘change found’ message below, then we did not detect any modifications to the test pages,” says the test site, going on:
Our experiment assumes that you are using a modern web browser with JavaScript enabled. We have tested our experiment with Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Safari 2, Opera 9, and Konqueror 3.5.
Our experiment first loads custom “integrity checking” JavaScript programs into your web browser. We collectively refer to these “integrity checking” scripts as the Experiment Harness. The Experiment Harness requests pages from the following six domains, plus an IP address:
1. washington.edu,
2. uwsecurity.com,
3. uwprivacy.org,
4. uwsystems.net,
5. uwcse.ca,
6. happyblimp.com,
7. 128.208.6.241.
The Experiment Harness requests pages from these different locations because ISPs may treat different types of websites differently, and we’d like to understand these differences. For example, some ISPs might only inject ads into .com sites, as observed by some users [BenAnderson].
The Experiment Harness then determines the integrity of each web page – i.e., the Experiment Harness determines if your ISP (or some other party in the middle) modified the web page between when our server sends it and when it arrives at your web browser. Our Experiment Harness is not affected by changes caused by browser plugins or extensions. If a page is modified in-flight, the Experiment Harness will show you exactly what changed.
Stay tuned.
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July 26th, 2007 at 9:46 am
These guys are looking for trouble. Oh The law suit for copyright infringement! Without talking about the customer protest who pay dearly for their internet access. Web page designer kill their but to make their web pages look great and these fart are messing these up by adding their shit on top of this? I don’t think so!
If an ISP persists with that crap let launch a campaign and kick them out of the net! block all their IP address ranges and spread the world world wide to all the web server administrator.
July 27th, 2007 at 12:24 am
Can’t wait til they publish which IPs are doing this!
July 28th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Where’s the link to the test site???