Hackers do not need to directly access the victim’s network traffic to find out what video the user is watching, what video hosting sites they are on, and what sites they are visiting. For this purpose, SnailLoad, a new cyber attack vector of side channel type, is used.
Attacks have become more difficult to detect. In addition, previously for this type of surveillance hackers first executed a series of man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks to run malicious code on the system, now they simply measure video latency for various YouTube videos and websites. Victim visits Based on this, hackers track the waiting time and create a digital fingerprint (fingerprint) of the target device.
As a result of the SnailLoad attack, a hacker can “slip” a series of malicious data from his server to the user. These can be different document formats, but the attack works with a variety of images, ads, styles and fonts. Its peculiarity is that the data is loaded very slowly from a malicious server: this allows the hacker to track the delays calculated in time.
Source: Ferra
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