Online tool to tackle good sites gone bad

• Popular websites usually targeted to infect malware on unsuspecting visitors
• New portal offers exploration, visualisation and analysis of infected websites

CLOUD-connected security and storage solutions provider Barracuda Networks Inc has launched Threatglass.com, an online malware detection tool it said was designed for users to share, browse and analyse malware-infected sites.
 
‘Good sites gone bad’ is a daily problem for popular websites that are usually targeted by attackers to infect malware on unsuspecting visitors, the company said in a statement.
 
“With Threatglass, the cyber-security community will have access to a high-level tool that can be used by anyone with minimal technical knowledge,” said Thiban Darmalingam (pic), regional manager for Barracuda in Malaysia.
 
“Each week, the platform will analyse millions of websites including the Alexa top 25,000 websites, social feeds and suspicious websites identified through Barracuda’s customer network that consists of more than 150,000 organisations worldwide,” he added.
 
Threatglass was originally developed for Barracuda and is now being shared with the cyber-security community, for both casual users and the research community to provide an effective way to document and better understand this ongoing problem, the company said.
 
“In the last few months, our malware detection engines at Barracuda Labs have found popular sites like Cracked.com (pic below), Php.net and Hasbro.com to be infected with malware. Threatglass’ large-scale automated system has catalogued approximately 10,000 live malware attacks and is constantly updating new ones every day to its system,” Thiban claimed.

Threatglass is an automated system that leverages heavyweight virtualisation to detect web-based malware in a vulnerability and exploit-independent manner. In addition to screen captures of the infections, the site displays details of these infected sites through various representations of network traffic including DNS, HTTP, and netflow in both graphical and textual formats.
 
Key features Threatglass users can explore include:
 
Visualisation

• Casually browse website infections in an Pinterest-like graphical representation

• View charting and trending data of historical malware volumes

• Examine relationships between various components of an attacker ring

Community

• Share data among other researchers

• Review easily-parsed breakout data as well as source data

• Submit websites for inspection and analysis

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