2024 Guide to Defacement Monitoring
Defacement is a key threat to today’s modern web. It presents a critical issue to brands in terms of reputation damage, but it also poses a more insidious threat in the form of damaged consumer experiences. Defacement is a particular challenge to traditional detection techniques. After all, defacement is almost always a “zero day” event with little or no history to allow for easy detection.
Defacement takes many forms and vectors. Typically, defacement will involve tampering with the end-consumer experience in terms of negative, brand-damaging text or images inserted on home pages. But these attacks can be more pernicious, with subtle edits weaved throughout otherwise clean HTML.
Defacement can also involve the injection of malicious scripts, trojans, viruses, or malware aimed at stealing information or damaging data. These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the web server’s operating system, platform, or security defenses, allowing attackers to hide malicious code in otherwise normal-looking web pages. Other defacement vectors can include phishing scams, DNS hijacking, email spoofing, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and so on.
Traditionally, to combat defacement security teams utilize multiple techniques.
- First, web application firewalls are used to monitor web traffic to detect patterns of malicious activity and identify attacks before they occur. These edge-protection systems help to stop or limit attackers’ attempts to access or damage unauthorized content.
- Second, application-level tools such as Sqreen and Preempt can be used to monitor for suspicious activities, such as SQLi injection attempts and blocking malicious user activity.
- Finally, the use of change control tools such as Git can be used to review changes made to website content prior to deployment, allowing for timely identification and notification of malicious code changes.
However, these approaches often miss emerging attack vectors that result in malicious edits to web content. Website change monitoring provides a mechanism for identifying these changes promptly. Typically, these solutions use periodic scans to proactively detect changes to web-facing content and algorithms to distinguish malicious changes from benign ones. This helps to identify malicious edits in an efficient and cost-effective manner and greatly reduces the possibility of defacement.
Fluxguard treats defacement as a core component of the larger issue of defect detection. Defects can be accidental or purposeful. They range from major to minor incidents, from the merely pesky to all-hands-on-deck situations, including:
- Inadvertent code rollbacks to prior versions
- Malicious data exfiltration via inserted Javascript
- Corrupted NPM or other tampering with inserted third-party scripts
- Disgruntled ex-employee who still has shell access
- Careless vendor who mistypes a few characters
- CDN caching issues
Fluxguard’s website change monitoring solution helps detect and prevent website defacement and malicious edits by using an advanced AI-based system to analyze website code and content. This ensures that any unauthorized or suspicious edits are spotted quickly and flagged before they cause any damage.
Fluxguard Provides Multiple Techniques to Detect Defacement
Fluxguard is precision designed to surface likely defacement through rules, machine learning, and configurable change detection. Indeed, at the heart of Fluxguard’s power is our ability to crawl any web site, baseline the content and code received, and look for deltas to that content over time. This approach forms the backbone of our defacement detection system. Let’s dig in.
Nothing to Install, Fluxguard Continuously Crawls Your Content
- Fluxguard crawls your site continuously with a full headless Chrome browser. Fluxguard creates baselines in terms of rendered DOM (meaning, the front-end HTML after execution of all Javascript), network activity, visual screenshots, extracted text, Google Lighthouse scores, side-by-side comparisons, Apache HAR activity, and more.
- Fluxguard mimics real users. Too often, today’s security systems look at code-level changes and other laboratory-like scenarios. This fails to detect emerging threats that occur only under complex in-the-wild scenarios. Fluxguard crawls content as a real user and simulates their behavior to induce hard-to-detect, evasive defacement and defects.
- Fluxguard conducts synthetic transactions across your entire digital portfolio. What does this mean in practice? Simply, we will instrument Fluxguard to fully interact with your site: this will include accepting various cookie consent combinations, creating accounts, logging in, logging out, adidng products to a cart, and so on. By doing this, Fluxguard is able to profile each page along complex user journeys; this allows Fluxguard to detect changes to content, front-end code, network activity, and screenshots at any point along the journey.
- Fluxguard requires no installation of anything on your site. As we’ve seen with SolarWinds and other recent security incidents, software designed to protect your digital assets can become an attack vector itself. For this reason, Fluxguard is a stand-off security system: it constantly trawls your web content looking for defects, defacement, and other problems. But nothing is installed on your site.
- Since we have no access to your system, Fluxguard does not provide rollbacks or analysis on the back-end. Rather, Fluxguard will mimic real users accessing your site. We will immediately alert problems and trigger a remediation flow on your side. But this remediation flow – including rolling back defective code – is not something that Fluxguard itself has any management over. We believe that this is ultimately a good thing as it limits the security threat picture of Fluxguard itself. But it does require more thoughtful integration than all-in-one systems that may include rollback directly.
Fluxguard Detects Problematic Content Changes
- Fluxguard uses a rules-based and machine learning system to detect unauthorized content changes. We score changes to text based on the presence of undesirable keywords across multiple languages. When a configurable threshold is exceeded, Fluxguard will immediately alert a remediation team to a likely defacement incident.
- Fluxguard surfaces all content changes as desired. Some sites have relatively infrequent content updates: in these cases, it may be suitable for Fluxguard to detect and alert any content change. We allow various instrumentation to support varied levels of detection and alert.
Fluxguard Alarms Data Exfiltration
- Our software crawls your web presence and records all first- and third-party resources loaded, including scripts, XHR, CSS, and more. Fluxguard profiles each script, and allows for fine-tuned whitelisting of certain domains (for example, perhaps you will decide to trust all resources loaded from google.com).
- Fluxguard alerts any new XHR, script, or other activity from a new, unapproved third-party domain. This allows for precise understanding of what scripts are loading, and when. Typically, Fluxguard will alert when any new external resources that have not been previously whitelisted are loaded onto your site. This prompts a notification to your security or web management team to review and assess the legitimacy and safety of these resources, ensuring that only approved content runs on your website.
- Relatedly, Fluxguard records and looks for differences to any first- and third-party cookies present on the browser. This allows for careful orchestration and auditing of complex privacy scenarios to ensure full compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and so on. After all, the cookies that are present on the browser are the ultimate arbiter of compliance, and these may not always reflect what OneTrust, GTM, or other tools indicate.
Fluxguard Detects Breaking Visual Changes
- Fluxguard screenshots every page on your site and looks for breaking visual changes. These changes often may have no corresponding text or HTML change. After all, a subtle change to a linked CSS file can have widespread consequences throughout your site, despite no other detectable changes.
- As with all change detection strategies, Fluxguard supports complex filtering, to remove or exclusively focus on different areas of a site. For example, you may decide a noisy sidebar is of little concern for a primary monitoring strategy. The sidebar can be removed, so that any subsequent screenshot exclusively focuses on a sidebar-free page.
- Fluxguard’s ability to detect visual changes is often referred to as visual regression testing. That is to say, we craft an initial baseline, and then continually look for regressions to that baseline that indicate a potential problem. This can include faulty CSS, broken images, defacement, CDN caching issues, and more.
Fluxguard Detects Suspicious New Javascript
- As indicated above, Fluxguard detects all changes to the network activity on any loaded page. This includes new scripts, XHR, CSS, and other resources. Fluxguard can alert any new scripts loaded from unauthorized domains.
Fluxguard Detects Problematic DOM Manipulation
- Fluxguard crawls every page on your site and records the resulting DOM. Problematic changes can be alerted at your convenience.
How to Integrate Fluxguard
- Fluxguard is ready-to-go and for many users can immediately realize value by instrumenting Fluxguard themselves through one of our low-cost self-service options.
- Fluxguard’s true power is typically achieved by an enterprise engagement with our team. We will conduct a brief discovery session, understand your goals, design a rapid proof-of-concept pilot (often for no charge), and propose a phased rollout of Fluxguard across your digital portfolio.
- Enterprise engagements typically include engineering to ensure complete last-mile-delivery of our solution into your ecosystem, including remediation processes.
- Fluxguard integrates into your remediation processes through immediate or summary emails, SMS, webhooks, API, Slack, and more.
- Reach out to us directly via email ([email protected]) to discuss engagement options. We are keen to hear from you!