Testing malware scanning tools with a hacked website

Some restaurant websites in Luxembourg are poorly designed and make it difficult to find important information (such as the opening hours, the address or perhaps a menu that has been updated in this decade). What happened yesterday was even more confusing: I was immediately redirected to a suspicious page that claimed to conduct a survey.

This is a so-called malicious redirect. The goal is usually to generate ad revenue for the hacker or to try to install malware on the vistor’s computer. I took this opportunity to test several tools which claim to be able to scan websites for vulnerabilities and malware. You’ll find the results below. Of course, I also notified the restaurant.

Notes:

I didn’t hack the website.
It’s not my website, which means I couldn’t test any popular tools which have to execute code on the server (e.g. MalCare, WordFence, WP Cerber Security). These tools may be more powerful although a malicious redirect should also be detected by external scans.
This is obviously not a comprehensive test. I’m also not a security expert.

Google Safe Browsing

There’s nothing wrong with the website according to Google. However, the report was last updated on March 29, 2019 and it’s likely the website was fine then.

Hackercombat

Hackercombat asks for a name, business email and phone number before sending you the result of the security scan. The email I received confirmed that the “website has been affected by malware” and offered a link to a page with general information and a “100% free” malware cleanup service.

Quttera

Quttera‘s results were inconsistent. The website was first rated as clean. Shortly afterwards, it was classified as suspicious in a second scan:

The detailed report did not clearly identify the issue as a malicious redirect.

ReScan.pro

ReScan.pro consistently identified the malicious redirect and made it very clear that the website has critical issues.

SiteGuarding

All that SiteGuarding’s malware scanner tells us is that the website was already blacklisted by Yandex Safebrowsing. Note: This scan and the second Sucuri scan were executed several hours after the other scans.

Sucuri

At first, Sucuri‘s external scan failed to detect the malicious redirect and claimed that no malware was found. It did complain about HTTPS mixed content which may have been a consequence of the redirect:

When re-testing the website several hours later, the report looked quite different:

To make matters more confusing, it seems that the restaurant’s webmaster was already working on fixing the issue at this time (you can see in the second report that the CMS was now listed as “unknown”).

Web Inspector

I gave up on Web Inspector as it was still “waiting [for] a free detection server” more than 8 hours after I first submitted the URL.

Conclusion

The results are not entirely satisfying. While I didn’t expect an external scan to be able to tell me how the malicious redirect was implemented, it seems that most of the tools had difficulties detecting the redirect at all. Only ReScan.pro managed to quickly and consistently identify the issue while also giving me immediate access to the report.

To put it in another way, when I notified the restaurant, the only report I could include to show that this was indeed a problem on their side was the one provided by ReScan.pro. Quttera and Sucuri did not show (clear) warnings at the time, Hackercombat did not give me immediate access to their report and Web Inspector was useless.

Thoughts on Form W-8BEN-E for companies selling software licenses

Your company is selling software and a customer in the U.S. is asking you for form W-8BEN-E? You should supply it or risk having 30% of your payment withheld. Some customers might also not place an order at all before receiving this form.

Disclaimer: This blog post is presented for educational and entertainment purposes only. I originally wrote the instructions below for my own company. They might be incomplete, wrong or not applicable to your situation.

Preliminary considerations

What are software licenses (in tax treaty terms)? For this article, I’m assuming they fall under royalties / copyright.
Does your country have a tax treaty with the U.S.? How much will you save by filling out from W-8BEN-E? Download table 1 (tax rates…) from this IRS page, find your country and look up the royalties / copyright tax rate:
Points at Malta: Ha-ha!

Official information

IRS page with form W-8BEN-E, official instructions and further information (download the form and the instructions here).

Instructions for filling out form W-8BEN-E

Part I – Identification of Beneficial Owner

Complete line 1 and 2

Check “Corporation” on line 4 (if you’re not working for a corporation, you’re probably reading the wrong blog post).

Skip line 5 (FATCA status) entirely. Software licenses are excluded from the FATCA definition of “withholdable payment” [see: Experis – Finance FATCA Checklist for Multinational Companies (PDF); EY – Information reporting and withholding: the impact of Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) on multinational organizations (PDF)].

Enter address on line 6.

Provide a US taxpayer identification number (TIN) in the form of an employer identification number (EIN) on line 8 or the tax ID assigned in your country on line 9b.

Part III – Claim of Tax Treaty Benefits

Line 14a: Check the box and enter your country.

Line 14b: Check the box at the beginning. Will you have to check another box below? The official instructions say:

If you are a resident of a foreign country that has entered into an income tax treaty with the United States that contains a limitation on benefits (LOB) article, you must complete one of the checkboxes in line 14b. You may only check a box if the limitation on benefits article in that treaty includes a provision that corresponds to the checkbox on which you are relying to claim treaty benefits. A particular treaty might not include every type of test for which a checkbox is provided.

To find out if your country’s tax treaty includes a LOB article (it most probably does), go to the IRS tax treaties tables page and look up your country in table 4 (limitation on benefits). You can find the complete text of the tax treaty through this page and read the articles mentioned in table 4. The official instructions for form W-8BEN-E also contain summarized versions of the LOB tests which might be useful. You should then be able to figure out which box to check.

Line 15: As far as I understood the instructions, this line has to be filled out only “if the treaty contains different withholding rates for different types of royalties.”[see IRS instructions]. Remember table 1 from the very beginning of this blog post? Look at it again. Are all royalties rates the same? If yes, skip line 15, otherwise, fill it in. As “n/a” is not a rate (I hope), I skipped this line (all rates were the same for Luxembourg).

Part XXX – Certification

Sign, fill in print name and date in U.S. format, check the box at the bottom.

Even though I really don’t want to deal with this topic again, I’ll leave the comments open so that you can correct me on all that’s wrong with my instructions. However, please don’t ask me to help you fill out form W-8BEN-E for your company!

Solution: The target version of the .NET Framework in the project does not match the .NET Framework launch condition version

The problem:

You’re building a setup project in Visual Studio (aka deployment project or installer project) and find the following warning in the build output:

The target version of the .NET framework in the project does not match the NET framework launch condition version... — The target version of the .NET framework in the project does not match the NET framework launch condition version…

Why this is happening:

The project you want to deploy (using the setup project) targets a more recent .NET Framework than specified in the setup project’s launch conditions.

In my case, the project targets .NET Framework 4.7:

application target .NET framework — Double click on ‘Properties’ in the Solution Explorer to show this screen.

Meanwhile, the setup project was still checking for .NET Framework 4.6.1 as a launch condition (requirement on the target machine).

The solution: Update the launch condition version to match the target framework of your project.

In the Setup Project, double click on ‘Microsoft .NET Framework’ to show its properties. Then change the .NET Framework version in the dropdown list:

One more thing: Check the prerequisites

While this has nothing to do with the warning, you might as well check which version of the .NET framework your setup program will install (if any).

Right click on the setup project and select ‘Properties’. In the Property Pages dialog, click on ‘Prerequisites…’:

Update: While I thought this issue only appears when you update your project’s target framework after having already created a setup project, it seems that it also happens when creating a new setup project. Also, changing the target framework version does not seem to update the InstallUrl (not sure if this is important).

Connecting a scale or balance to a Raspberry Pi: project ideas

On digitalscalesblog.com, I showed how easy it can be to send the weight from a scale to a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi (if you choose the right scale). As I had never used Python before, all the script did was print the weight data. That doesn’t mean you have to stop there. Here a some ideas and links to get you going.

Use the Raspberry Pi as a serial device server (from RS-232 to TCP/IP over Ethernet or WiFi). Code examples can be found in the pySerial documentation.
Build a protocol converter. Most scales use proprietary protocols, but you can convert the data to MQTT or other protocols as shown here. Do not say that you have developed a protocol converter, call it an IoT gateway to get more attention.
Use speech synthesis to output the weight as spoken words for visually impaired users.
Use speech recognition to send commands to the scale (e.g. the tare command).
Install a Pi Camera Module and take a picture of the user every time the scale is overloaded.
Turn the scale into a checkweigher by comparing the weight with preset values and making under/accept/over LEDs light up.
Transform the weight into a proportional analog signal (voltage) because… I have no idea! Why do people keep asking for weighing scales with an analog output? Seriously, if you know the answer, please tell me.
Trigger an alarm or something worse when an object is removed from the scale:

Raiders of the Lost Ark IMAX Movie CLIP - Throw Me the Idol (2012) - Harrison Ford Movie

Solution: Your administrator has blocked this application because it potentially poses a security risk to your computer

The Problem: Your administrator has blocked this application…

You’re trying to install a ClickOnce application and get an error message saying: “Your administrator has blocked this application because it potentially poses a security risk to your computer”:

You are the administrator and don’t remember blocking any applications (if you’re not the admin, contact them instead of reading this article).

The reason this is happening

The ClickOnce trust prompt is disabled on your operating system, so instead of a dialog (prompt) which allows you to either proceed with the installation or not, you just get the message above.

The solution

You can change the ClickOnce trust prompt behavior by editing the registry subkeys under:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\.NETFramework\Security\TrustManager\PromptingLevel

There should be five subkeys, one for each security zone:

Each subkey can have one of the following values:

Disabled: No trust prompt is shown, instead you get the error message above.
Enabled: A trust prompt is shown.
AuthenticodeRequired: A trust prompt is shown only for signed applications (other applications cannot be installed).

Trust prompt example

If the application you’re trying to install has been published on the Internet, you’ll want to set the Internet subkey to “Enabled” (or to “AuthenticodeRequired” if the application has been digitally signed). You should then see a trust prompt instead of the “your administrator has blocked this application” error:

Free Trust Prompt Tool

As an alternative to editing the registry manually, you can also use a free trust prompt tool I wrote:

It allows you to easily display and modify the trust prompt configuration.