We know 15k websites are infected. how do we tell them?
scotthelme.co.uk
scotthelme.co.uk
I believe the default configuration for suspected spam and phishing and other malicious sites is that the user gets a red warning page that they have to click through first. Website owner would either get notifications from users or notice the drop off in traffic?
Primary obligation is to the users, not the owners of websites that got themselves infected.
Better than a customer telling you they got a nasty bug from your site!
> Supply chain - a third-party script file that a site loads is infected with malware, and is then loaded on to the site, exposing all visitors.
I already know many will disagree, but this is far too vague for your answer to make much sense. The list of 15k websites isn't given.
Most websites have at least one analytics script. Some of the biggest vendor names in that space have known XSS issues via nonce reuse that they aren't going to fix because it threatens their entire business model.
You usually get the whole clown car as soon as you allow one 3rd-party script for relatively innocent use cases like wanting a heatmap of user interaction.
You should fully expect that such a blacklist would take out most, if not all, of the websites you use every day. The security model for 3rd party scripts tends to be "trust me bro, we're $bigname"
That's the standard definition of a supply chain attack. If the website maintainer was acting maliciously or incompetently, it wouldn't be a supply chain attack anymore.
The blame game isn't going to solve this. Blaming it entirely on the website owners/maintainers is only treating the symptoms instead of the disease.
The scripts should be 100% static files hosted by the same origin and not be obfuscated. These scripts should not make additional requests to inject even more scripts that cannot be known until run time and are specific to that targeted visitor. These scripts should be released in the usual semver tradition with matching hashes that never change without the explicit action by the same domain that the user actually visited (making the nonce obsolete).
Like I said, this is a very old debate with a very simple solution whose only problem is that it breaks the business model of a multi-billion dollar idea. Not only would this tighten up security, but your favorite websites wouldn't lag so hard anymore either. The vast majority of complaints about the web being slow are from the dozens of HTTP requests constantly being made behind your back. This is exactly why so many users feel forced to use an adblocker even though that doesn't always work.
Maybe if the site owners experience their sites going down due to this they'll look for some alternatives.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
I would agree with that.
Most vendors of such lists don't have a contact method, don't respond, or say they're only aggregating a set of secret sources and it's up to me to look for those. Only a handful will actually respond to requests to re-evaluate the allegation, and remove you if it was/is false
The correct answer is probably the abuse contact shown in the WHOIS data. That's programmatically accessible and thus scales
This is an incredibly brave thing to do in 2026.
Sorry mate, the era of forums is over.
A State might be composed of humans but it is a machine, a generally unthinking machine, which projects force on and breaks individuals.
UPDATE: Unpopular because it means there's a lot of work for the owner to moderate the files. And large sites like facebook are notorious for very bad moderation. It's not like we mandate them to hire N moderators per M users.
There's a middle ground for this though. Platforms like Youtube, Facebook, etc, have no excuse anymore. They can literally scan with these models they have available and handle it. So write the legislation based on their capacity so you don't screw the one dude just trying to support some indie game devs in a small community or something.
You've unwittingly helped to spread malware to an innocent person, so yes, it is your problem.
When somebody reports that you are spreading malware, what do you do with that information?
So far as I can tell, the malware uploaded to my site is when people use it as a virtual usb stick; transferring files to a lab system or something else they already have access to. A multiplayer remote desktop site was popular for a while, loads of links to shared virtual machines and sometimes people would upload screen recordings of something that happened (usually social things like someone saying something edgy in a chat that runs alongside). Since it's a lab environment, the users enjoy letting loose all sorts of malware and they'd use my site to get it there, but they always already had access or you can't type in the URL and execute the file
There was one instance where someone did make a self-spreading piece of malware, custom for my site. It would try to occupy a lot of short links, so pretty much no matter what you guessed, you'd end up finding that Windows executable and, if you ran it, it would upload itself to create yet more valid download links. Didn't do anything malicious to infected machines, just a nuisance to the site until I banned IP addresses that continued to spam the site
Of course, that's just focusing on the malware. The vast majority of uploads are screenshots, legit software (matching sha2sum with a known good source), long links or commands someone would otherwise have to type over, stuff like that. On occasion there's waves where some community will decide to use it for something, like rich Koreans sharing chatroom links for about a year comes to mind. A few teachers use it for very short temporary links that they can write on the chalkboard/whiteboard for students to download coursework from. It was down for 2h last week due to a power outage and one of my old teachers opened a github ticket about it, that was nice to see :)
Are you talking about CollabVM? :)
Running anti-virus scanners immediately on uploaded files was a widespread practice in the BBS Era, adopted in response to the same kind of abuse. FTP sites did it, too. There was usually a delay for (run on a schedule) virus scanning between uploading to one of the shareware FTP sites and the file getting out of the upload directory and into the download areas.
The headlined article isn't really about hosting user-uploaded files, though. In no sensible system do user-uploaded files go straight into the site's own published JavaScript. The headlined situation is not analogous either to you or to BBSes, involving script hyperlinks to defunct third parties in one form of the problem, so what to do when it comes bad uploads from users is really going off on a tangent from Scott Helme's actual question.
Can anybody tell me it's not that bad?
When I showed and asked who maintains her site, she said it regard to the malware, "All sites look like this"
That was when it hit me. They have won. The web is so full of garbage to the average person that they cannot even recognize it as it feeds on them.
The webadmin is some Chinese guy on upwork.
This would be an idea very similar to haveibeenpwned.com, which is immensely helpful.
I don't get why he brings "responsible disclosure" into this. That is appropriate when you find a door lock that is easily picked; that is not appropriate when you are watching from across the street while a house gets looted.
Just give them the deets.
Google, Facebook, Bing, other large platforms will get those websites blocked. Their traffic falls almost to zero. Then:
either web admin notices and fixes website
or people stop visiting yhem
either way, no more infected people, win for everyone.
Okay so let's say this is your site. You notice that Firefox gives a warning, you find the issue, remove the malicious dependency and roll out the new version. Now what? Who do you talk to to get unblocked?
I run a site that's on blocklists. There's no coming off of them once you're there (described elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50398014). These mechanisms are useful for sites that are unmaintained, but I'd not wish it upon admins that immediately respond to vulnerability or abuse reports
I can understand that most people are not aware of this though, just a bit frustrating to see the call for nuking it altogether. It's not what you'd do if one of these 15000 sites was Onedrive: you'd realise the solution is talking to Microsoft. Only when they don't fix their infection would it make sense to take their site offline
Perhaps a coordinated attempt with CERTs or a basic attempt at email contact would be a good idea, but if emails are nowhere to be seen and there is no way to determine a relevant taskforce, reporting the domains seems like the obvious problem.
Getting blocklisted sucks, but so does identity theft, drive-by malware, and credit card fraud. Without things like SECURITY.txt or contact email addresses, there's not a lot more you can do to prevent these people from (unwittingly? intentionally?) spreading harm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183953
and another one, this was restored in a few hours:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538760
Now I am not saying it's a good thing there are so many blocklists, but there are sites who got onto them and then came back. I guess you are required to actually fix stuff, you can't just change nothing in your website and expect to be unblocked.
Feed the domain list to an ai and tell it to collect contact addresses. Send them an email.
Or look at the CDNs websites are using, then contact the CDN.
Or, contact the biggest (top 10) hosting providers in each of the countries and speak to them about this issue. Give them access to the list and they should be easily able to check if a site is hosted by them.
You don't need to solve everything at the same time. Just look at the worst offenders and solve them.
If we know what bad javascript malware is out there and how to recognise it, then browsers could have an antivirus, to block the offending code? As an opt-out feature, not opt-in, where known actively malicious JS would be scanned for and removed. Presumably, a number of compromised websites were compromised once and attackers aren't going around updating all their malware in all their compromised servers as soon as they get blocked?
Then again, the web is getting so bloated already, even suggesting that we make everything slower in order to filter out the known harmful bloat makes me shudder
Responsible disclosure is to prevent harm. You think about your disclosure options and pick the one that is best overall weighing the impact and harm.
They're already infected - or so you claim.
I get that companies want to use responsible disclosure as a mechanism so it can save face and their reputation, and if both are possible at the same time then sure.
But if you think you're right, you have to pick one and live with the consequences; and its not that hard to pick the right choice.
In fact, if you don't make the right choice you need stop misusing the word “responsible disclosure”.
Publish the URLs that prove they're infected. Auto update it whenever one get's fixed.
That sounds like the opposite of the goal of that procedure, since the point is the disclosure. Telling everyone about a weakness before it can be solved would harm users, that's why you coordinate with the vendor, but disclosure and resolution is the goal you're working towards. Saving face would be a gag order or agreement, which many companies indeed have tried, but that's the opposite of companies that publish their procedure for coordinated vulnerability disclosure (also/formerly called responsible disclosure) so that white-hats can report issues without fearing legal action. That also means that these companies have to own up to it once the issue is resolved, or at least the hacker is free to talk about it
The rest of your comment is right though: for sites that are already infected, being quiet about it doesn't prevent a vulnerability from being exploited anymore
I host a modest pile of WordPress and other applications, and all traffic gets proxied by nginx. I've been occasionally sniffing around for something that I could use to monitor the JS of outbound traffic and give me a heads-up if it smells like one of the sites is delivering something it shouldn't be, but I haven't found a tool for this that I like yet.
Group by country, and let them handle it.
https://www.edpb.europa.eu/contact/notify-a-data-breach_en
But I think you are asking the wrong question. The challenge is how to minimize damage.
You can list them all out, with the specific pages/methods that are compromised and shouldn't get much backlash from the owners.
This is a different situation than a CVE
If you want to be paid for your efforts, I dunno :\
* If its feasible to do, try to programmatically discover the hosting providers behind the websites...This probably brings the total number of recipients to a much smaller list.
* Then very very politely inform the hosting providers of the situation. Basically, you'd be emailing the OVHs, Hetzners, digital Ocean, HostGators, etc. of the online world.
Typically a website owner will pay attention to messages from their hosting provider...and i will assume such providers get similar notifications a lot...maybe they even have automated processes to send/forward along messages o site owners.
Although i do stress be very polite, because you don't want the providers to slam hard closed the websites before disclosing to *their* customers (the website owners)...You want disclosure, not a sort of "uninformed take down via bureacracy" of their websites. If the above process works, then public shaming is avoided, the folks who control the infrastructure (hosting providers) are informed, and they handle management with the site owners, and other parties who would have received your email but may not know more efficient methods to handle this (like the local police) are not distracted from their other important work. I hope this helps!
And yes, it would mean shut the sites down in some cases - the ClickFix stuff for WordPress is near-impossible to clear while the site is online.
It is annoying for a while until you have whitelisted all the scripts you actually need for the websites you frequently use.
Visiting a new website will mean dealing with allowing scripts for 20sec.
It is also of course not a 100% solution, you still have to be careful. But it is amazing how much crap it filters out.
I've posted an update to address many of the comments here on HN and also across social media, you can find it here:
https://scotthelme.co.uk/we-know-15-579-websites-are-infecte...
What's the email address for owners of 1 or 1000 sites to find out if they're listed in your stewpot?
And then advertise the 'checker' website.
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/section/about-this-website/report-sc...
It would have to be a fully automated / AI system that attempted to scrape sites for contact emails, look up domain ownership if possible, and even guess emails (info@<domain>, contact@<domain>, support@<domain>, etc.)
(To be fair, I was a bit annoyed by a recent AI bro spamming about fifteen such prefixes on my domain with a false positive vulnerability report. The PoC did not work and the field they were injecting was already correctly escaped. But it is an effective contact method if you're facing a bulk problem like this I suppose. Maybe try just one prefix at a time until an email is accepted)
> Since GDPR back in 2018, I've found that data to be mostly useless. What you get is either nothing, a registrar web form, or a relay address
This is the way though. If there is no contact in the domain's whois, then contact the abuse handler for the IP address that it's hosted on
Domain registries (not the registrars) are usually very interested in dead contact methods, at least I've been repeatedly threatened with losing the domain if they find it's not functional. You usually get like two weeks to fix it if issues are found, but they do seem to care. Maybe not .ru (I have no experience with them), but in general I'd let them know and see if that triggers an update before moving to more drastic measures
Another way would be looking for an email address on the homepage or pages linked from the homepage (usually /contact or /impressum or such, but of course this varies)
Lastly, some people may be willing to help out and look for a contact method in a crowdsourced manner. Could also use an LLM but I expect people are more reliable and volunteers are cheaper too
> If the list is widely disseminated and absorbed into blocklists, trying to get your domain of those lists afterwards is close to impossible. For a small business, that could be devastating.
As someone who experienced this (thankfully just a hobby project and not a business), thanks for that consideration! However, I'd encourage this line of action for the ones that are uncontactable. If the site is abandoned, what else are you going to do?
It should be more or less possible though. Just not easy.
I suspect that these problems exist everywhere at this moment in all major systems.
Perhaps a bot to attempt to make contact and alert the staff.
It's too bad that such a person would likely end up arrested if they don't mask their identity.
...why?
Some of the sites collect credit card information. Wouldn't they have a 'contact us' or some other legal identity information required for collecting and charging cc's?
Other than looking at security.txt what else have they tried? did they try programmatically checking for a 'contact us'? or the old trick of emailing 'webmaster@domain.com' or 'admin@domain.com'? did I miss those details in the article?
Maybe things have changed in the past 10 years, but it was a MASSIVE deal if a website ended up on some site claiming it has malware. Like, contract-ending, people-getting-fired, 10s of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees kinda deal.
I don't think 'it's hard' is a good excuse to ignore responsible disclosure
But to be fair, that small web situation was before my time as well. Afaik that's still the directory to look in though. Complaining to third parties behind these owners' backs is a bit of a dick move, though I can understand the reasoning since most people are not aware of the repercussions (see my other replies in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50397828)
But maybe that's not the way and someone will at least tell me why :)
im sure for 15,579 websites there will only be about 2500 of them that send the cops after you for "hacking their site", manageable
It does cost some money, but a possibile solution could be to spin up some cheap agents to search for contact details for each website individually. (For the subset of sites which don't have any findable contact details some other solution would be required.)
Edit: I could see the benefit if they do vetting of the message though. Like if one person vets the message and then it makes it into 15000 inboxes is better than having to deal with 15000 antispam mechanisms. Maybe there's something to this after all. Or if email providers would act upon spam better and we block the ones that don't, maybe we could just not have spam in the first place. Idk why this is so hard in the first place
> whois ycombinator.com
Domain Name: ycombinator.com
[snip]
Admin Name: REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
[snip]
Admin Email: 1bd279b6ad24fb60b2e200db8f486c3f-2545852@contact.gandi.net
My primitive websites are FREE of all javascript, the tool by which advertisers and corporation anger us with Paywalls, Nag screens and the like.
Hope all of them explode.