Redirects are malicious, and can hurt more than the user than the website itself. These attacks sneakily divert visitors to harmful third party websites designed to grab personal data, dispense malware, or pull off phishing schemes. Keeping your website safe from such threats is a wonderful thing to do to help maintain its credibility and keep users safe.
Malicious Redirects Are a Critical Problem
Context:
On Tuesday, Dell released a statement that a security researcher reported the existence of this vulnerability to Salesforce, which fixed the issue within 24 hours of notification. Due to its potential impact, however, neither Dell nor Salesforce feels inclined to share all the details relating to this vulnerability.
For Salesforce, it is a particularly valuable issue because their cloud environment has been compromised by the threat of malicious redirects.
Users rely on a site and trust that it is safe and for what it was created for: to provide information or deliver a purchase or service. But if they are suddenly sent to a malignant site, this trust is broken. That ends their experience and could put their handlocking buffering ern in danger.
This kind of attack is especially damaging for businesses. Not only does it make it look like the website is poorly run, but if it makes the site appear as if it was directly involved in the attack it can lead users to believe it was on the side of the attackers. Once the malicious code is removed, it will still take some time before user trust can be rebuilt and visitors skeptical of a site that once put their security at risk.
Malicious Redirects in a Real World Scenario
Consider a user visiting a well known e commerce website to make a purchase. When you click on a product, you’re not led here to find more details or to buy, instead you’re taken to a dodgy third party site. The malicious site can trick the user into installing a fake ‘security update,’ or to give the site ‘verification’ of their sensitive personal information. Users will innocently download malware or hand over their personal data unwittingly to the scam.
Such breaches not only the user’s personal information, but also deal serious blow to the e-commerce website’s reputation. Once that happened you know the user will never come back to use the site even if security measures are put in place after such an event.
Imunify360 and Malicious Redirects Protection
Imunify360 is built with a number of advanced detection and defense mechanisms to protect your website and users from malicious redirects. Here’s how it works:
1.Real-time URL Verification: Every time there is a redirect on your website, the target URL is checked using trusted internal and external URL reputation services which look for malicious content.
2.URL Classification: Any of these services can now classify any URL flagged as harmful as a malicious URL.
3.Proactive Defense: Once we have a url identified as malicious, Imunify360’s Proactive Defense is deployed. It intercepts any redirection of your website (your site, e.g. via PHP header() function) to the malicious URL preventing a problem from taking place.
Conclusion
Keeping your website safe from malicious redirects is crucial for your website’s reputation and your user’s trust. Imunify360 integrates with a solution such as your solution which can provide proactive protection against these threats, as well as providing a safe and secure environment for all of your visitors.
