Evolving JavaScript Obfuscation Techniques Making Defense Harder

As JavaScript becomes an increasingly key component of online attacks, attackers are investing more energy in obfuscation and other techniques to make defenders' attempts at reverse engineering more difficult, a security researcher told attendees at the annual CanSecWest conference on Wednesday.

Attackers have adopted the same techniques used to hide the purpose of other types of malicious code, such as splitting up the code into many components and the use of custom encoders, to obfuscate JavaScript, said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer at network-protection firm Arbor Networks. Other advances include the addition of functions aimed at detecting any attempts at debugging or running the program in a virtual machine, he said.

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