Free Live-Streaming Websites May Put Viewers at Security Risk: Study
Online
streaming has become an increasingly popular way to watch sports and other live
events but a new study suggests that viewers are often exposed to malware
infections, personal data theft and scams.
According
to the researchers from KU Leuven-iMinds (Belgium) and Stony Brook University
in the US, as much as 50 percent of the video overlay ads on free
live-streaming websites are malicious.
"Until
now, free live-streaming services (FLIS) have mostly been analysed from a legal
perspective. Our study is the first to quantify the security risk of using
these services," said M Zubair Rafique from KU Leuven's department of
computer science/iMinds in a university statement.
"We
have assessed the impact of free live-streaming services
on users. We also exposed the infrastructure of the FLIS ecosystem," he
added.
The
researchers built a semi-automated tool that helped them identify more than
23,000 free live-streaming websites, corresponding with over 5,600 domain
names.
They
then performed more than 850,000 visits to the identified FLIS domains and
analysed more than one terabyte of resulting traffic.
"It's
a public secret that the FLIS ecosystem is not averse to using deceptive
techniques to make money from the millions of users who use their services to
watch live (sport) events," added Nick Nikiforakis from Stony Brook
University.
"One
example is the use of malicious overlay ads, which cover the video player with
fake 'close' buttons. When users click these buttons, they risk being exposed
to malware," he added.
"In
addition to exposing numerous copyright and trademark infringements, we found
that clicking on video overlay ads leads users to malware-hosting webpages in
50 percent of the cases. Most of these pages are made to look like the actual
free live-streaming websites," Rafique noted.
Google Chrome and Safari are more vulnerable to
this approach than other browsers, because attackers tend to target the more
popular web browsers.
To
alert FLIS users to potentially dangerous pages, the researchers have
engineered an accurate and effective classifier. The tool can also help
security analysts find and report unknown FLIS pages to curb copyright and
trademark infringements.
In
a later stage, the classifier will be made publicly available for research
purposes.
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