As you can see, you do not have to click on a malicious link to end up with one malware on your computer. A new report by Morgan Marquis-Boire and the Citizen Lab shows how companies can carry out targeted attacks by distributing malware from websites deemed trustworthy. A company with the brand name Hacking Team έχει χρησιμοποιήσει τις τακτικές αυτές με το traffic από το YouTube και των servers της Microsoft for domain login.live.com, distributing innocent videos with surveillance software designed to track the target's activities.
According to The Verge the attacks are more targeted than traditional malware attacks, and usually involve a single person. They rely on the access of its infrastructure Internet which the government has to intercept the traffic.
The Hacking Team is usually working with governments like Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, but Marquis-Boire says similar capabilities have been used by US, British, Russian, Chinese and Israeli intelligence agencies.
Snowden documents released by the Washington Post identified malware injections from NSA infected over 80.000 different devices.
Since injection attacks on everyday web traffic cannot be easily detected and countered, many companies have decided to adopt HTTPS encryption as a potential defense. The HTTPS protocol encrypts the connection between the user and the server, preventing attacks. Currently, only a small portion of web traffic is encrypted, but Google offers incentives to websites that switch to encryption, such as a better position in search rankings. What is not known is whether login.live or YouTube will switch to default HTTPS, but Marquis-Boire reports that both Microsoft and Google "have taken steps to close the vulnerability by encrypting all targeted traffic."