Today, many attackers are part of organized crime with the
intent to defraud their victims. Their goal is to deploy malware
on a victim’s machine and to start collecting sensitive data,
such as online account credentials and credit card numbers.
Since attackers have a tendency to take the path of least
resistance and many traditional attack paths are barred by a
basic set of security measures, such as firewalls or anti-virus
engines, the “black hats” are turning to easier, unprotected
attack paths to place their malware onto the end user’s machine.
They are turning to client-side attacks. In this paper, we
examine these client-side attacks and evaluate methods to defend
against client-side attacks on web browsers. First, we provide
an overview of client-side attacks and introduce the honeypot
technology that allows security researchers to detect and
examine these attacks. We then proceed to examine a number of
cases in which malicious web servers on the Internet were
identified with our client honeypot techno