Banner ads on CNN.com contain keyloggers

https://twitter.com/brannondorsey/status/1019253914133286912

by braxxox • 8 years ago

157 79 8 years ago

twitter.com

sbinthree2• 8 years ago

How likely is this to be due to accessibility (ie. keyboard-only users) vs. keylogging?

ruskerdax• 8 years ago

Doesn't seem likely that an advertisement would need to embed that kind of functionality.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

What kind of functionality? This is just a generic library for more easily managing keyboard input, JavaScript itself supports the same but in a more clunky way.

tjoff2• 8 years ago

How can an add increase accessibility by listening to the keyboard?

sbinthree2• 8 years ago

Keyboard shortcuts instead of onclick handlers. Unless someone is using Vimium there is no way to use a keyboard to navigate the web without explicitly defined keypress handlers.

reilly30005• 8 years ago

What could an advertiser good to track with key logging? Password to their... CNN account??

mipmap04• 8 years ago

A password to an individual's CNN account could easily be their same login to their bank or other more important account.

giancarlostoro• 8 years ago

People can buy ads and place their own JS in them I'm guessing... This might go beyond just CNN.

notadoc2• 8 years ago

My guess would be to see what people are typing but not submitting, along with what they're searching for, commenting, etc.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

CNN staff and contributors could be the target.

notadoc2• 8 years ago

Here's what is actually being run

http://dmauro.github.io/Keypress/

cbcoutinho• 8 years ago

Why aren't the code snippets in a monospace font? Is there readability ux that thinks this is a good idea?

wild_preference• 8 years ago

They are on my screen.

nsuser3• 8 years ago

They are in monospace?

eat_veggies• 8 years ago

they look monospace to me

https://i.imgur.com/K5L7xit.png

52-6F-62• 8 years ago

So basically, it's just an event-capturing interface to what you can do natively in the browser already. It doesn't necessarily mean anything is being logged. The code using the library would need to be inspected—whatever callbacks are being fired, etc.

Mister_Snuggles• 8 years ago

Things like this make me happy that uMatrix exists.

chaosfox• 8 years ago

indeed ! keypress.js is blocked on the easyprivacy list as well.

wanderfowl2• 8 years ago

Dearest Ad Industry,

This is why we run ad blockers. Since you won't regulate your industry, we're fixing the problem for you.

Love,

The Rest of the World.

Yizahi• 8 years ago

PS: and please burn in hell, asap.

Sincerely,

Concerned users of the Internet.

reilly30005• 8 years ago

takers of the internet?

Crontab• 8 years ago

Sites bemoan ad blockers but then take no responsibility for the ads that are shown. That needs to change - it’s not like print advertising.

DmenshunlAnlsis• 8 years ago

Change or not, I think the trend is not to trust ads anymore. I question whether or not it’s feasible in the long term to sustain a model based on tracking people, selling their data, and calling that “advertising.”

Oh and if you want to see what CNN is crapping out without the cruft, lite.cnn.io works well.

stochastic_monk• 8 years ago

Surveillance is not advertising.

SpaceGorilla• 8 years ago

Right? Imagine IRL advertising that would break into your house and put up advertising posters or plant listening devices.

smudgymcscmudge• 8 years ago

I don’t think I would like that at all.

dwild• 8 years ago

Seems more taking a plant to your house while knowing it will listen to you, while there is plant that won't listen to you but that you have to pay for.

That listening device is the cost of the plant... don't like it? Then pay to avoid it...

It's that simple, there's no alternative. They have to pay to make that content and send it to you. If it's not advertising that pay for it, that cash won't appear out of thin air. Someone needs to pay for it and if it's not an advertiser that does, it needs to be you.

There's plenty of news agency that offer paid membership without ads, go for them.

There's plenty of people that can't afford to pay or that just doesn't have the means to. I remember the amount of content I was able to learn because advertising was subsidizing it. My parent were sadly against paying on the internet and I'm far from being the only one that learned that way.

curiousgal• 8 years ago

We couldn't even trust them to not play sound blasting ads at 1am let alone with this.

microdrum4• 8 years ago

Google's monopoly status means it fulfills 90+% of the ads. I can guarantee you that CNN has no control. There is no competition. So, erm, maybe the onus is on Google?

mikeash• 8 years ago

Surely a company as big as CNN can run their own ad service instead of contracting it out. Do they pass the buck like this for ads on their TV channel?

lolsal3• 8 years ago

CNN absolutely has control. CNN could vote with their dollars and use a different ad platform.

oh_sigh2• 8 years ago

Google ads container keyloggers? I doubt that.

Zyst• 8 years ago

Is this confirmed to be Google ads? Because otherwise the comment is needlessly misleading.

bitmapbrother3• 8 years ago

Do you have any proof that the ad was served by Google or are you just guessing? I was under the impression they had checks to prevent this.

p49k• 8 years ago

Bad ads appear with every ad network, and ad networks are lazy to stop it because they know that sites will take all the blame (your comment is a great example). Pop into /r/adops sometime (or the associated slack channel) and watch site owners working nonstop to try to find a solution to this problem. It's mostly a game of whack-a-mole at this point with no real long-term solution in sight.

dahart2• 8 years ago

Sites bemoan ad blockers but then take no responsibility fo the ads that are show. That needs to change - it’s not like print advertising.

It has been changing and improving for years.

Your statement is true for the ad content for sure. (Though sites do take flack for inappropriate ad content, just like print publications have.)

This is irrelevant to the OP’s link, though, since it’s not a keylogger and keyloggers aren’t actually possible.

Ads are subject to the security rules imposed by the browser, and for the most part every abuse that ads have attempted have been shut down. Sometimes not as fast as we’d like, I admit, but for the most part I think the system is working.

Ads can no longer play audio, they can’t see data passing between me and the site they’re embedded into, they can’t abuse popups anymore, etc., etc.. Every time an advertiser comes up with some new annoying way to try and get extra attention, the good folks designing the web and making the browsers patch the hole.

I like that the web standards and browsers, and laws to some extent, are where the responsibility lies, and I wouldn’t want to have individual sites taking responsibility for the security of ads.

As for bemoaning ad blockers, at least keep in mind the ads in ad-supported free content is their revenue stream, and that the majority of ads aren’t malicious. Personally, I’d love to see a better free business model than ad-supported free content. In the mean time, paying directly for ad-free content, and putting up with ads are our main options.

lifeformed• 8 years ago

The point stands, but that's not really a keylogger. It's a library to manage keyboard inputs. Of course, it could also send all key info somewhere externally too.

wanderfowl2• 8 years ago

But in what universe would an individual ad need that? This seems like precisely the sort of thing that a third party ad would be prevented from doing.

ErikHuisman• 8 years ago

Keypress.js doesn't really help creating a keylogger. It does make creating interactive ads easier though.

mmcwilliams• 8 years ago

It appears to be getting the keypress.js library from ssl.cdn.turner.com. Not clear if the data is being exfiltrated, though, just by looking at that tweet.

trash_panda• 8 years ago

Exactly it is incorrect to jump to the conlusion that they are using a keylogger. I mean, they're loading a JS library that allows to handle keypress events; but if you talk about a keylogger everyone assumes that they're stealing your keystrokes.

What needs to be done is to navigate the site and typing a given char sequence on every page while logging the HTTP traffic, then do a search for that sequence to see if it appears in any request. That's the basic thing you could do to actually verify if there is a keylogger.

roscoebeezie• 8 years ago

I’ve noticed CNN has had a crap ton of redirect ads recently...

reilly30005• 8 years ago

They come in waves and go away when ad exchanges figure out how to block them. It isn't usually tied to a single publisher, as they are bought and sold across ad exchanges that reach most of the ad funded web. They are extremely difficult for even manual reviewers to spot and reproduce, so the whole industry works to stop them together. Then new ones pop up.

snissn• 8 years ago

I'm skeptical that this is a) from a banner ad and not from operation of the site b) a full blown keylogger and not a library included that is used for something like a photo gallery (that may have ads in it)

jpalomaki• 8 years ago

Also, the file is served from turner.com domain, which is the company who owns CNN.

nvr219• 8 years ago

This is getting upvoted without getting the context.

ryanlol• 8 years ago

ssl.cdn.turner.com

Obviously bullshit. That's CNNs CDN, not a "banner ad". This guy did not put in the least bit of effort to verify his claims.

The script is included in https://edition.cnn.com/.a/2.103.4/js/cnn-header-second.min....

neetdavid• 8 years ago

It appears to be used to set up multi-key hotkeys for debugging. Pressing 'd o h' on the page requests some adfuel console resources.

cirenehc2• 8 years ago

Scripts from the ad should be iframed no? Doesn't make sense that an ad could run arbitrary JS within the same browsing context as the host.

tialaramex• 8 years ago

It doesn't make any sense, but it's very popular.

To be fair, when they're desperate real world newspapers are like this too.

A flush successful newspaper will make a deal of its editorial independence and insist you write "Advertising Feature" in big letters at the top of your full page ad, use a completely different typeface and give your company's name, but when money is tight the guy selling those adverts is under pressure to compromise. What if it says "Sponsored content" rather than "Advertising Feature"? And rather than big letters at the top, how about small disclosure text at the bottom? The typeface could be a very good clone of your normal editorial typeface, and still count as "different" right? And lets have a byline which says "Our staff", that's vague, and the poor reader might think it means it was written by journalists, but it doesn't strictly _say_ that, it just says "Staff" which could be anybody...

This is how internationally famous British newspapers end up running content literally written in Beijing or Moscow to let everybody know how free and wonderful those countries are, using weasel words like "in co-operation with". And if the _actual_ news is a bit awkward? Well, you wouldn't want that lucrative sponsored content deal to lapse would you? Maybe a brief mention on page 14 is enough, even if those newspapers which still have a backbone ran it on their front page.

cirenehc2• 8 years ago

Are you sure this approach is popular? AFAIK none of the top ad platforms allow you to inject scripts. Do you know any?

isostatic2• 8 years ago

And of course this all stems from the fact people have stopped paying for news.

DannyB22• 8 years ago

It's not CNN. It's ads.

Advertising has ruined every medium it has ever touched. It will ruin the web. It is only a matter of time. It did not destroy ancient network television overnight. It did not destroy cable tv overnight.

The last time I saw cable tv a few years back, it had become so bad that after a long run of ads, they would then put bugs and walk on people right over the content of the show you were watching. Sometimes obscuring important content within that show.

imglorp• 8 years ago

Which is why NF is so successful and cable is bleeding from the arteries. Consumers want to choose their device, on their schedule, without tampering with the content, and they want good and timely selection of content. They will pay well for this.

thaumaturgy• 8 years ago

Lots of speculation here, not much analysis, even from lazy gits like me.

Chrome web inspector kindly gives the "Initiator" for every request. In this case it's cnn-header-second.min.js. Load that, and Chrome again kindly detects minified JS and offers to pretty-print it.

The context here appears to be some kind of ad console tool, added by CNN, not by an ad. The relevant function is at https://pastebin.com/EwgPAM6T

It's a bit obfuscated/minified, and they don't seem to have a non-minified version available, so it's not clear exactly what functionality this is enabling.

Either way, not really a keylogger if it's not capturing all keystrokes and shipping them off somewhere.

corny• 8 years ago

Functionality is to enable an "AdFuel Creative Review" form when typing "d o h" anywhere on the page. Try it. Then click the blue icon in the lower right.

reilly30005• 8 years ago

The tool is for reviewing bad ads and ad stack QA.

thrownaway954• 8 years ago

as someone who claims they are a programmer and researcher... you would think they would have done some more research on this and also have common sense to know that this isn't a keylogger.

mabufo• 8 years ago

cross domain script blocking should be enforceable in all browsers

climber604• 8 years ago

This is a prime example of how people so easily accept a headline shared on some news authority to be truth. Even the bright minds at hacker news are duped - just look at all the discussion happening here with the assumption the headline is correct.

The guy who tweeted this jumped to a conclusion, naively shared his discovery, then let it perpetuate leaving numerous victims of an erroneously altered world-view.

NotQuantum• 8 years ago

I seriously think people shouldn't be able to comment / see comments on HN unless they've at least clicked on the darn link. I took one look at the "keylogger" source code and recognized it.

LinuxBender• 8 years ago

I would suggest their "lite" [1] version. It is compatible with addons like NoScript, uMatrix, uBlock, Canvas Fingerprint Defender, CSS Exfil Protection, Privacy Settings and Self Destructing Cookies. I am using FF 52 ESR. Some of these addons may not work in 58+.

They could improve their HTTP header settings a bit. [2]

[1] https://lite.cnn.io/

[2] https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcnn.com%2F&foll...

stickfigure• 8 years ago

CNN, like the vast majority of news sites, is best viewed with javascript disabled. Pages load 10X faster, scrolling is not jumpy, the CPU doesn't go crazy, and text reads just as well. It is hands down a much improved user experience.

dahart2• 8 years ago

Iframed banner ads can’t log keystrokes outside their frame, browsers don’t allow that. And no site in their right mind would include ads that aren’t iframed.

A keylogger would be possible if there was some kind of zero day exploit, but this isn’t that, it sound like the tweeter didn’t do their due diligence. I’m curious how someone gets as far as looking through the minified JavaScript without knowing the browser doesn’t allow that, obviously(?), otherwise all your passwords and information would have been compromised long ago.

snopes_ads• 8 years ago

press shift-control-z on cnn.com and you will get what this supposed keylogger is (hint - its not a keylogger or comgin from an ad) but merely a cnn internal tool..

Banner ads on CNN.com contain keyloggers

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