ABOUT ERMES CYBER SECURITYWeb trackers are invisible services designed to spy on the operations that users do on the Web. When a user browses the Web, they collected pieces of information from user’s browsing activity, that they use to build a detailed profile containing many personal and highly private information. Commonly used by digital advertising giants to create and serve targeted advertisements, these services have become highly intrusive. They are so invasive that they are not only able to identify, track and monitor each single user and know his interests, but they also know his IT equipment. This is done by using the so-called device fingerprinting (detecting type of device, operating system version, installed applications, antivirus status, etc.).
The evolution of these services has also deeply changed the scenario after the emerging of hundreds of data brokers, companies that make their business with the sale of highly private and sensitive information. These dynamics have caused the explosion of a real market, where data acquisition let any entity obtain secrets, and vulnerabilities. This information is very valuable for shady businesses, where hackers or criminal agencies can easily abuse of this knowledge, thus making their victim extremely vulnerable to attacks. This involves not only employees’ privacy, but also the company own security, since this makes every employee and his device a known target. Armed with this information, the hacker can forge the perfect attack, for each specific device, using ad-hoc user engineering techniques, and malware specifically created to exploit that specific device vulnerabilities, and its user interests. Spear phishing (the jargon for email or electronic communications scam targeted towards a specific individual) becomes a breeze, given the knowledge of user’s interests and his recently Web operations. These attacks are employed in high percentage of cyber- attacks, including some that have recently been reported by multinational corporations, diplomats (www.securityweek.com/state-sponsored-attackers-use-web-analytics- reconnaissance) and government agencies. It was previously thought that the cause of these attacks had to be found in the unknowingness of the victims. But nowadays, the detailed knowledge that Web trackers and data brokers have makes this kind of devastating attacks possible even for expert users. |
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