Fool Me Once…
Summary: Krebs on Security reports that a January 16, 2013 sales thread for a $5,000 Java zero-day on the Darkode crime forum was a trap set by forum administrators to identify which accounts journalist Brian Krebs was using to lurk there. Krebs retracted the story after leaked private messages showed admins had built a watermarking scheme that tagged forum pages with unique markers to trace screen grabs back to specific user accounts.
Why it matters: The forum's administrators turned a single fake sales thread into a two-day mole hunt that identified a seasoned researcher's accounts, and the same watermarking technique can expose any analyst who screenshots a criminal forum without accounting for per-user page markers.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
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