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In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics providers to gain insights into visitor behavior.
For security and privacy, website owners need to be aware of the content they provide their users. However, in reality, they often do not know which third parties are embedded, for example, when these third parties request additional content as it is common in real-time ad auctions.
In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study to analyze the magnitude of these new challenges. To better reflect the connectedness of third parties, we measured their relations in a model we call third party trees, which reflects an approximation of the loading dependencies of all third parties embedded into a given website. Using this concept, we show that including a single third party can lead to subsequent requests from up to eight additional services. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the third parties embedded on a page load are not always deterministic, as 50 % of the branches in the third party trees change between repeated visits. In addition, we found that 93 % of the analyzed websites embedded third parties that are located in regions that might not be in line with the current legal framework. Our study also replicates previous work that mostly focused on landing pages of websites. We show that this method is only able to measure a lower bound as subsites show a significant increase of privacy-invasive techniques. For example, our results show an increase of used cookies by about 36 % when crawling websites more deeply.
In dieser Arbeit wird eine ganzheitliche Bedrohung für Business-Chat-Anwendungen aufgezeigt und bewertet: Chishing – Phishing über Business-Chats. Die Bedrohung hat ihren Ursprung in den Anfängen der heutigen vernetzten Welt und das zugrunde liegende Problem wird als Spoofing in seiner einfachsten Form bezeichnet. In vier von sechs Business-Chat-Tools, die in dieser Arbeit analysiert werden, ist es möglich, Anzeigenamen, Profilbilder und weitere persönliche Informationen erfolgreich zu fälschen. Dies stellt eine Bedrohung für Unternehmen dar, da es Insider-Bedrohungen Vorschub leistet und unter Umständen auch externen Entitäten dazu einlädt, sich als interne Mitarbeiterin auszugeben.
Das Gesundheitswesen in Deutschland, Europa, aber auch weltweit steht gerade erst am Beginn eines notwendigen und besonderen Digitalisierungsschubs. Ein wichtiger Schritt im Rahmen dieser Digitalisierung wird es sein, sämtliche medizinische Daten leistungsträgerübergreifend einfach verfügbar zu machen. Dies ermöglicht neue Methoden der Behandlung wie durch KI-Ansätze oder die Vermeidung von Doppelbehandlungen. Zur Erreichung dieser Ziele ist es unabdingbar, dass moderne medizintechnische IT-Geräte miteinander vernetzt werden und die anfallenden Daten sicher verarbeitet und hinterlegt werden. Durch diesen Prozess entstehen aber auch neue Angriffsvektoren und die Risiken steigen erheblich an.
Diese Arbeit beschreibt zunächst grundlegende Cyber-Sicherheitsstrategien, die helfen die vorhandenen Risiken zu minimieren und mit den verbleibenden Risiken umzugehen. Zusätzlich werden konkrete Sicherheitsbedürfnisse- und Anforderungen, die zur Vernetzung von Medizintechnik und zur Verarbeitung von Daten in der Cloud, nötig sind diskutiert. Abschließend wird eine Gesamtarchitektur vorgestellt, die diese Sicherheitsbedürfnisse umsetzt.
Vor vier Jahren betrat die Datenschutz-Grundverordnung (DS-GVO) die Bühne und brachte für Unternehmen und Nutzer gleichermaßen Veränderungen mit sich. Doch gerade im dynamischen Umfeld des Online-Marketings tauchen ständig neue und oft knifflige Fragen auf – Fragen, die nun im Rahmen einer wissenschaftlichen Studie etwas genauer unter die Lupe genommen wurden.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018, brought new rules for the processing of personal data that affect many business models, including online advertising. The regulation’s definition of personal data applies to every company that collects data from European Internet users. This includes tracking services that, until then, argued that they were collecting anonymous information and data protection requirements would not apply to their businesses.
Previous studies have analyzed the impact of the GDPR on the prevalence of online tracking, with mixed results. In this paper, we go beyond the analysis of the number of third parties and focus on the underlying information sharing networks between online advertising companies in terms of client-side cookie syncing. Using graph analysis, our measurement shows that the number of ID syncing connections decreased by around 40 % around the time the GDPR went into effect, but a long-term analysis shows a slight rebound since then. While we can show a decrease in information sharing between third parties, which is likely related to the legislation, the data also shows that the amount of tracking, as well as the general structure of cooperation, was not affected. Consolidation in the ecosystem led to a more centralized infrastructure that might actually have negative effects on user privacy, as fewer companies perform tracking on more sites.
Software updates take an essential role in keeping IT environments secure. If service providers delay or do not install updates, it can cause unwanted security implications for their environments. This paper conducts a large-scale measurement study of the update behavior of websites and their utilized software stacks. Across 18 months, we analyze over 5.6M websites and 246 distinct client- and server-side software distributions. We found that almost all analyzed sites use outdated software. To understand the possible security implications of outdated software, we analyze the potential vulnerabilities that affect the utilized software. We show that software components are getting older and more vulnerable because they are not updated. We find that 95 % of the analyzed websites use at least one product for which a vulnerability existed.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are one of the main challenges in modern computer security. They are planned and performed by well-funded, highly-trained and often state-based actors. The first step of such an attack is the reconnaissance of the target. In this phase, the adversary tries to gather as much intelligence on the victim as possible to prepare further actions. An essential part of this initial data collection phase is the identification of possible gateways to intrude the target.
In this paper, we aim to analyze the data that threat actors can use to plan their attacks. To do so, we analyze in a first step 93 APT reports and find that most (80 %) of them begin by sending phishing emails to their victims. Based on this analysis, we measure the extent of data openly available of 30 entities to understand if and how much data they leak that can potentially be used by an adversary to craft sophisticated spear phishing emails. We then use this data to quantify how many employees are potential targets for such attacks. We show that 83 % of the analyzed entities leak several attributes of uses, which can all be used to craft sophisticated phishing emails.
Web measurement studies can shed light on not yet fully understood phenomena and thus are essential for analyzing how the modern Web works. This often requires building new and adjustinng existing crawling setups, which has led to a wide variety of analysis tools for different (but related) aspects. If these efforts are not sufficiently documented, the reproducibility and replicability of the measurements may suffer—two properties that are crucial to sustainable research. In this paper, we survey 117 recent research papers to derive best practices for Web-based measurement studies and specify criteria that need to be met in practice. When applying these criteria to the surveyed papers, we find that the experimental setup and other aspects essential to reproducing and replicating results are often missing. We underline the criticality of this finding by performing a large-scale Web measurement study on 4.5 million pages with 24 different measurement setups to demonstrate the influence of the individual criteria. Our experiments show that slight differences in the experimental setup directly affect the overall results and must be documented accurately and carefully.
Damit die medizinische Versorgung weiterhin flächendeckend gewährleistet werden kann und den explodierenden Kosten Einhalt geboten wird, muss ein Gesundheitswesen der Zukunft auf digitalen Technologien basieren. Die Kritikalität der entsprechenden Health-Services ruft Cyber-Sicherheit auf den Plan – die Sensibilität der im Gesundheitswesen verarbeiteten Daten den Datenschutz. Ein zukunftsfähiges Gesundheitswesen braucht einen stringenten Rechtsrahmen, eine moderne cloudbasierte Telematikinfrastruktur, die je nach Sicherheitsbedarf in verschiedenen Modellen umgesetzt werden kann, einen restriktiven Umgang mit globalen Public-Cloud-Providern, eine besonders gesicherte, leistungsstarke Forschungsdateninfrastruktur – etwa zur Optimierung von KI-Fähigkeiten, sichere Gesundheitsanwendungen und einiges mehr. Hier ein Ausblick.
Third-party tracking is a common and broadly used technique on the Web. Different defense mechanisms have emerged to counter these practices (e.g. browser vendors that ban all third-party cookies). However, these countermeasures only target third-party trackers and ignore the first party because the narrative is that such monitoring is mostly used to improve the utilized service (e.g. analytical services). In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study that analyzes tracking performed by the first party but utilized by a third party to circumvent standard tracking preventing techniques. We visit the top 15,000 websites to analyze first-party cookies used to track users and a technique called “DNS CNAME cloaking”, which can be used by a third party to place first-party cookies. Using this data, we show that 76% of sites effectively utilize such tracking techniques. In a long-running analysis, we show that the usage of such cookies increased by more than 50% over 2021.