We know 15k websites are infected. how do we tell them?

DivingForGold

Heh. My primitive websites are FREE of all javascript, the tool by which advertisers and corporation anger us with Paywalls, Nag screens and the like. Hope all of them explode.

Guestmodinfo

Make a website, name it 15579infected.com and name everywebsite. Most of the website owners would soon wise up by word of mouth and visit your website and most probably contact you and you tell them what vulnerability each one has so they can rectify. You can charge them for your service.

boothby

The old answer: communicate with major search engines and browser vendors. Dunno what to tell you now...

baby_souffle

Report each domain to the major browser vendors so they can update their list of suspicious sites? I believe the default configuration for suspected spam and phishing and other malicious sites is that the user gets a red warning page that they have to click through first. Website owner would either get notifications from users or notice the drop off in traffic?

superkuh

In the old days you'd just do a whois of the domain name and email the system administrator or tech contact. But GDPR made whois data illegal and destroyed that system so now there is no way to contact anyone unless you both happen to be on the same corporate walled garden (facebook, twitter, etc) they might list on their site.

wlkr

As someone in the UK, I'd expect something along the lines of (1) reporting to the website owner by email and if they don't respond then just (2) reporting it to the police. It used to be common to go to the hosting provider but I'm not sure if people still do that anymore. At this scale it would be kind to do (1) but also just jumping to (2) seems like more than enough to have 'done the right thing'. https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/about-this-website/report-sc...

theamk

Work to add them to Google Safe Browsing blocklist (Why are they not on the list anyway? Surely Google will be interested in their technique) Google, Facebook, Bing, other large platforms will get those websites blocked. Their traffic falls almost to zero. Then: either web admin notices and fixes website or people stop visiting yhem either way, no more infected people, win for everyone.

zzzeek

oh by all means email them all directly saying you found a vulnerability. im sure for 15,579 websites there will only be about 2500 of them that send the cops after you for "hacking their site", manageable

pizzafeelsright

You could send an interview request to their technical staff with an assignment that injects the fix into their production environment. I suspect that these problems exist everywhere at this moment in all major systems. Perhaps a bot to attempt to make contact and alert the staff.

brink

I like to imagine a rogue good-samaritan will hack these websites to apply security fixes before logging out. It's too bad that such a person would likely end up arrested if they don't mask their identity.

thaumaturgy

Tangential but related: can anyone point me towards what tools are being used to identify this kind of malicious JS? I host a modest pile of WordPress and other applications, and all traffic gets proxied by nginx. I've been occasionally sniffing around for something that I could use to monitor the JS of outbound traffic and give me a heads-up if it smells like one of the sites is delivering something it shouldn't be, but I haven't found a tool for this that I like yet.

notorandit

Whois on domain and IP.

thesuitonym

Try abuse@[domain] or the admin contact listed in WHOIS.

lacoolj

Are you trying to get a bounty or something or just want to be responsible? You can list them all out, with the specific pages/methods that are compromised and shouldn't get much backlash from the owners. This is a different situation than a CVE If you want to be paid for your efforts, I dunno :\

fusslo

> We continue to reach out directly to those sites that we identify as particularly high impact and try to notify them, though this is happening on an admittedly small scale. The process of responsible disclosure consumes a lot of resources, use of security.txt is low, and the vast majority of our emails and messages go unanswered. It's simply not possible for us to scale this up. ...why? Some of the sites collect credit card information. Wouldn't they have a 'contact us' or some other legal identity information required for collecting and charging cc's? Other than looking at security.txt what else have they tried? did they try programmatically checking for a 'contact us'? or the old trick of emailing 'webmaster@domain.com' or 'admin@domain.com'? did I miss those details in the article? Maybe things have changed in the past 10 years, but it was a MASSIVE deal if a website ended up on some site claiming it has malware. Like, contract-ending, people-getting-fired, 10s of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees kinda deal. I don't think 'it's hard' is a good excuse to ignore responsible disclosure

0xbadcafebee

Over the years I've found so many Fortune 500's with either massive bugs that broke the site for customers, or huge security holes, and spent hours trying to find a way to report it to them, to no avail. The people who make these websites just don't give a shit. So I now just look up WHOIS and email the domain's contacts and give up.

cubefox

> As these are sites we're crawling and identifying ourselves, we have no contact information like we would for a customer. It does cost some money, but a possibile solution could be to spin up some cheap agents to search for contact details for each website individually. (For the subset of sites which don't have any findable contact details some other solution would be required.)

teekert

Is there no "have I been powned" for websites?

athrowaway3z

I think something has gone very wrong for you to be doubting the answer. Responsible disclosure is to prevent harm. You think about your disclosure options and pick the one that is best overall weighing the impact and harm. They're already infected - or so you claim. I get that companies want to use responsible disclosure as a mechanism so it can save face and their reputation, and if both are possible at the same time then sure. But if you think you're right, you have to pick one and live with the consequences; and its not that hard to pick the right choice. In fact, if you don't make the right choice you need stop misusing the word “responsible disclosure”. Publish the URLs that prove they're infected. Auto update it whenever one get's fixed.

ryan_glass

Email them - many sites have a contact page with an email address. Tell them what the issue is up front. Be specific and give all the details they need to confirm the issue. Don't ask them to follow up or for payment. These are both red flags as there are so many spammers and scammers out there.