Herding Vulnerable Cats

Abstract

Hosting providers play a key role in fighting web compromise, but their ability to prevent abuse is constrained by the security practices of their own customers. Shared hosting, offers a unique perspective since customers operate under restricted privileges and providers retain more control over configurations. We present the first empirical analysis of the distribution of web security features and software patching practices in shared hosting providers, the influence of providers on these security practices, and their impact on web compromise rates. We construct provider-level features on the global market for shared hosting-containing 1,259 providersby gathering indicators from 442,684 domains. Exploratory factor analysis of 15 indicators identifies four main latent factors that capture security efforts: content security, webmaster security, web infrastructure security and web application security. We confirm, via a fixed-effect regression model, that providers exert significant influence over the latter two factors, which are both related to the software stack in their hosting environment. Finally, by means of GLM regression analysis of these factors on phishing and malware abuse, we show that the four security and software patching factors explain between 10% and 19% of the variance in abuse at providers, after controlling for size. For web-application security for instance, we found that when a provider moves from the bottom 10% to the best-performing 10%, it would experience 4 times fewer phishing incidents. We show that providers have influence over patch levels-even higher in the stack, where CMSes can run as client-side software-and that this influence is tied to a substantial reduction in abuse levels. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Vulnerability management; Systems security; Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; Economics of security and privacy; Web protocol security;

Secure Storage of Crypto Wallet Seed Phrase Using ECC and Splitting Technique

“…1) Security Issues and Website Vulnerabilities: From the perspective of the online "hosting provider" or the "website administrator", Tajalizadehkhoob et al [37] investigated website vulnerabilities and security issues. They argued that in a shared hosting environment, webmasters and providers share responsibility for web security.…”

Our (in)Secure Web: Understanding Update Behavior of Websites and Its Impact on Security

“…Update Behavior Update behavior of software has been previously studied. Tajalizadehkhoob et al [19] measure the security state of software provided by hosting providers to understand the role of hosting providers for securing websites. Vaniea et al [23] conduct a survey to understand the update behaviour of software.…”

“…To understand how up to date the utilized software on the Web is and to understand its possible security implications, we conduct a large-scale measurement. Previous work also analyzed update behavior on the Web (e.g., [19,23]) but -to the best of our knowledge -our measurement is more comprehensive than the previous studies. While we analyze over 5.6M sites and nearly 250 software (SW) products, other work in this field often only analyzed one specific type of software or a small subset.…”