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title: "Deceptive Previews: A Study of the Link Preview Trustworthiness in Social Platforms"
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title: "Deceptive Previews: A Study of the Link Preview Trustworthiness in Social Platforms"
author: Giada Stivala, Giancarlo Pellegrino
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# Deceptive Previews: A Study of the Link Preview Trustworthiness in Social Platforms
**Deceptive Previews: A Study of the Link Preview Trustworthiness in Social Platforms** - Giada Stivala, Giancarlo Pellegrino, NDSS Symposium.
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Deceptive Previews: A Study of the Link Preview
Trustworthiness in Social Platforms
Giada Stivala Giancarlo Pellegrino
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
giada.stivala@cispa.saarland gpellegrino@cispa.saarland
Abstract—Social media has become a primary mean of content Unfortunately, the popularity of social platforms has at-
and information sharing, thanks to its speed and simplicity. In tracted the attention of scammers and other malicious users,
this scenario, link previews play the important role of giving a who use social platforms to distribute malicious links exposing
meaningful first glance to users, summarizing the content of the users to a plethora of security risks ranging from online scams
shared webpage within their title, description and image. In our and spam to more concerning risks such as exploitation of
work, we analyzed the preview-rendering process, observing how
it is possible to misuse it to obtain benign-looking previews for
0-day vulnerabilities in mobile devices (see, i.e., [3]). The
malicious links. Concrete use-case of this research field is phishing security risks of visiting malicious web pages have been at
and spam spread, considering targeted attacks in addition to the center of the attention of the past decades of research
large-scale campaigns. activities, focusing on, for example, detection techniques [13],
[20], evaluation of defenses (e.g., [22], [30], [21]), studying
We designed a set of experiments for 20 social media the attacker behavior (e.g., [16], [5]), and detection of evasion
platforms including social networks and instant messenger ap- techniques (e.g., [39], [18]). Only recently, the attention has
plications and found out how most of the platforms follow their shifted on studying the extent to which these attacks entered
own preview design and format, sometimes providing partial
and adapted to social platforms. Existing work has studied
information. Four of these platforms allow preview crafting so
as to hide the malicious target even to a tech-savvy user, and different aspects such as the pervasiveness of spam campaigns
we found that it is possible to create misleading previews for the in social networks (e.g., [32], [15]), the infrastructure used by
remaining 16 platforms when an attacker can register their own attackers to distribute malicious pages [29], and the accounts
domain. We also observe how 18 social media platforms do not spreading malicious content (e.g., [35], [9]). Other lines of
employ active nor passive countermeasures against the spread of works looked at the demographics of the victims (e.g., [27]),
known malicious links or software, and that existing cross-checks showing that individual and communities behavior influence
on malicious URLs can be bypassed through client- and server- the likelihood to click.
side redirections. To conclude, we suggest seven recommendations
covering the spectrum of our findings, to improve the overall This paper looks at the problem of malicious link distribu-
preview-rendering mechanism and increase users’ overall trust tion by investigating one of the elements used by attackers
in social media platforms. to draw the attention of the victims, i.e., link previews.
Link previews synthesize the content of a web page, and
anecdotal evidence suggests that they are a fundamental piece
I. I NTRODUCTION of information used by users to decide whether to click.
For example, in 2017, Facebook forbade users to modify the
The way Internet users access online information has
content of link previews during the creation of posts [28] to
changed dramatically. While not so long ago, users relied
contain the creation of deceptive link previews to influence
on search engines to find new online content, nowadays
user clicks [28]. This paper puts under the microscope the
users predominantly follow links distributed over social media
connection that previews create between users and the actual
platforms such as social networks and instant messaging to
landing pages, with the overarching goal to provide a new
discover web pages. For example, about 40% of web traffic
interpretation of the reasons why social platforms’ users click
in 2017 originated from social networks [2], against the 37%
on malicious links. Our investigation starts by delivering one
share of Google searches [2]. When sharing a link, instead
of the first characterizations of the process of the link preview
of showing the raw URL string, social platforms prepare a
creation of 20 popular social media platforms. We provide
user-friendly preview often containing an image, a title, and a
a comprehensive analysis covering three relevant aspects, i.e.,
description extracted from the shared web page. Link previews
the fields composing link previews, the layout of link previews,
play an important role to reach and engage Internet users
the platforms’ behavior when fetching the web resources of
by providing a meaningful overview of the page content and
a preview. Once established a behavioral baseline, we probe
inviting users to click on them to access more information.
social platforms with malicious links to determine devia-
tions from our baseline and characterizing—if any—platforms’
defense mechanisms. Finally, starting from the observations
Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 2020 collected during our investigation, we show how an attacker
23-26 February 2020, San Diego, CA, USA
ISBN 1-891562-61-4 can create in practice effective malicious web pages that all
https://dx.doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2020.24252 our 20 platforms display as benign-looking link previews. In
www.ndss-symposium.org particular, in four of them, i.e., Facebook, Xing, Plurk and
Slack, an attacker can stage such attacks by controlling the 1
content of the web pages only. Finally, we show how to bypass
Internet Social Network
existing countermeasures to avoid the detection of malicious
URLs. 2
User
SSR
This paper makes the following key findings. First, we 3
discovered seemingly innocuous behaviors when creating pre-
views that provide a great advantage to an attacker. For exam-
ple, on Facebook, an attacker can create a benign-looking link Shared Resource Friends
preview of a malicious web page, fooling even experienced
and skilled Internet users. Similar attacks are effective against Fig. 1: Sequence of steps when sharing pages on social
other platforms too, such as Xing, Plurk, and Slack. Second, networks.
the vast majority of the tested platforms do not implement
any countermeasure that prevents sharing malicious URLs.
Only two platforms (Twitter and LinkedIn) implement such
countermeasures and, sadly, they are improperly implemented, experiments providing the platforms with malicious content,
allowing an attacker to bypass them with redirections. Third, i.e., blacklisted links or known malware. We present con-
the shortcomings identified by our study are not merely techni- siderations on passive and active countermeasures employed
cal issues and are not limited to a few social platforms. Instead, by each social media platform. Section V presents the link
we present a systematic problem affecting all platforms in the preview creation under adversarial influence and presents our
ways they design and create previews. Our results show 14 attacks. Finally, Section VI presents a set of recommendations
distinct link preview layouts, each with several optional fields. and technical solutions.
Such a large number of variations may fail to help users in
establishing trust with the previewed web sites. As a result, II. BACKGROUND
users may overlook security-relevant signals and underestimate Before presenting the study of this paper, we introduce
the security risks of the previewed page, exposing themselves building block information. In Section II-A, we start by
to a plethora of web attacks. Finally, from the analysis of our introducing the general framework used to generate a link
results, we distilled a list of seven recommendations, ranging preview, and then, in Section II-B, we present the list of social
from short-term solutions to the technical shortcoming, to the media platforms that we selected for our evaluation. Finally,
creation of a standard encoding for the content of link previews in Section II-C, we introduce the threat model considered in
and the rules to create them. our analysis.
Contributions — To summarize, this paper makes the follow-
ing contributions: A. Sharing External Content on Social Media Platforms
• We present the first comprehensive study and charac- Sharing text messages on social platforms, such as social
terization of the link preview creation process of 20 networks, is usually a straightforward process: a user logs into
popular social media platforms, showing which field the platform, types the message, and posts it. The message is
is shown under what circumstances; then stored and delivered to all friends when they update their
timeline. When the message contains a URL, the platform re-
• We present 14 distinct link preview templates and trieves the resources in the shared page to build a link preview.
variants across all platforms, indicating the lack of In theory, link previews can be created either by the client-side
consensus among all platforms; program (e.g., Javascript) or the server-side programs. How-
ever, as URLs often originate from third-party domains, most
• We perform a set of controlled experiments to de- platforms cannot rely on the client-side programs because the
termine the presence of existing countermeasures on same-origin policy for cross-origin requests (SOP for CORs)
social platforms, showing that all except for two prevents the client-side programs from fetching resources from
platforms do not implement any defense mechanism. other origins by default. Accordingly, platforms tend to use
Furthermore, we perform additional tests to determine server-side requests [25] (SSRs).
their effectiveness, discovering that the two counter-
measures can be easily bypassed via redirections; Figure 1 shows the sequence of steps when sharing URLs
on social platforms. The user accesses the social media plat-
• We test the link preview creation in an adversarial form through their browser, or through a mobile app, and then
setting, showing that four platforms out of 20 can cre- types the URL in the input box to share the URL content
ate benign-looking previews for malicious resources, with friends or contacts (Step 1 Figure 1). Then, the platform
fooling even experienced and skilled users; performs a number of SSRs to retrieve the URL and the linked
• From our results, we distill 7 recommendations to- resources, e.g., images (Step 2 Figure 1). Then, the platform
wards more robust and trustworthy link previews; processes the collected resources to create a preview for the
webpage. The construction of the preview can be aided with
Organization of the Paper — The content of the paper is a set of additional HTML meta tags specifying suggested
structured as follows: Section III presents the general behavior content for each field of the preview, such as the page title
of the social media platforms under test when posting a and page description. Two popular meta tags languages are
regular link, creating a baseline for following observations Open Graph [11] by Facebook and Twitter Cards [37] by
and comparisons. In Section IV we repeat the link submission Twitter. Table I shows the list of meta tag types that can be
2
Open Graph Twitter Cards Description
og:title twitter:title The title of the article without any branding
og:description twitter:description A brief description of the content.
og:image twitter:image The URL of the image that appears in the preview.
og:url - The canonical URL for the page, without session variables or user identifying parame-
ters. This URL is used to aggregate likes and shares.
TABLE I: Description of meta tags used to create the link preview of HTML content
social networks that no longer exist, (ii) we were unable to
create user accounts2 , (iii) the social network is ranked too
low in the Alexa Top 1M, (iv) platforms that do not support
link sharing (e.g., Soundcloud), (v) platforms that require
Premium subscriptions, (vi) social networks that merged with
already discarded ones, and (vii) posting prevented due to bot
detection. Table II lists the 10 social networks that we used
for the study of this paper.
Listing (1) Open Graph and Twitter Cards tags for both Previews
2) Instant Messaging Apps: We created the list of candidate
instant messaging apps by crawling the first 32 apps in order of
appearance from the category “Communication” of the Google
Play store. To these samples, we added six more apps (i.e.,
Instagram, Discord, Slack, Kik, Signal, and Snapchat), that we
considered popular but not part of the initial list. From these
38 apps, we removed duplicates obtaining a list of 28 instant
messaging apps. Then, we inspected each app manually and
(a) Preview on Facebook (b) Preview on Twitter
removed 18 of them for the following reasons: (i) not available
in the Apple Store3 , (ii) no instant messaging function, (iii) link
previews not supported, and (iv) a low number of downloads.
Fig. 2: Example of real world use of meta tags. Table II lists the 10 apps we used for the study of this paper.
C. Threat Model
used to create previews for HTML content. Listing 1 shows
an example of meta tag use to create two previews of the We now present the threat model of this paper. In this paper,
same article. Figure 2 shows two screenshots for the resulting we assume the best scenario possible for both the attacker and
previews. the victim, i.e., a strong attacker and a tech-savvy user.
Attacker — The attacker of this paper intends to lure their
B. Case Studies victims into visiting a malicious web page. The specific final
We conduct the study of this paper on 20 popular social attack delivered with the malicious page can vary, based on
media platforms, ten of which are social networks, and ten are the motivations of the attacker. For example, an attacker with
instant messaging apps. In this section, we present the selection economic interest may want to steal credit card numbers with a
criteria we used. phishing page. In this paper, we also consider highly-motivated
powerful attackers such as state-sponsored attackers that can
1) Social Networks: We created an initial list of social use malicious pages to deliver 0-day exploits to compromise
networks by combining two sources. First, we manually in- users’ device.
spected the Alexa Top 1M domains, retrieved in May 2019,
and removed all the websites which do not fall under the Social The attacker uses social media platforms to distribute the
Network category (e.g. amazon.com); then, we manually vis- link to the malicious page. For example, in the case of social
ited the remaining ones until we collected 30 social networks, networks, the attacker can register one or more accounts
with no pre-established cutoff on the domain rank value. Then, to direct the campaign. The attacker can also use stolen
we merged the 30 social network domains from the Alexa Top credentials to spread malicious links over a platform, including
1M domains with additional 30 domains of social networks instant messaging systems. Their goal is to post malicious links
ranked by the number of users. For this ranking, we used 2 The main reason was the language barrier. Then, even when using
the list maintained by Wikipedia1 , retrieved on July 2019. automated translation and help from a native speaker (Chinese), we were
Then, from these 60 social networks, we removed duplicates deemed to be a robot or a non-trusted user, and denied access to the platform.
obtaining a list of 47 social networks. We would speculate this occurred because our mobile phone numbers were
not Chinese or because of the geo-location of our IPs.
We inspected each of the 47 social networks manually, 3 We ignored apps that are not in the Apple Store because of our testing
and removed 37 of them for one of the following reasons: (i) setting (See Section III). We used one iPhone device and one Android device:
one for the user sharing a link, and the other for the user clicking on the link
1 See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of social networking websites preview.
3
Social Network Alexa Visible Features User Actions
Shared URL
Mouse over
Facebook 3
Site descr.
Add. Info
Site title
Twitter 11
Image
VK 15
Host
LinkedIn 23 Name Priority
Pinterest 67
Tumblr 75 Facebook # DP O, H, 6T
Medium 113 Twitter G
# #
G G
# #
G # SU # T, O, 6H
Xing 1.294 VK # # DP # O||T, H
Plurk 1.341 LinkedIn # # URL # O, H, 6T
MeWe 5.142 Pinterest # # # URL # O||H, 6T
Tumblr G
# #
G # DP # O, H, 6T
App Downloads Medium # URL # O, H, 6T
Instagram 1.000.000.000+ Xing G
# #
G # DP # O, H, 6T
Messenger 1.000.000.000+ Plurk # G
# # # URL # O, T, H
Skype 1.000.000.000+ MeWe G
# # URL # O, H, 6T
Snapchat 1.000.000.000+ Instagram G
# #
G # - # O||T||H
WhatsApp 1.000.000.000+ Messenger - O, H, 6T
Line 500.000.000+ Snapchat # # - # O, T||H
Viber 500.000.000+ WhatsApp G
# #
G - # O, H, T
KakaoTalk 100.000.000+ Skype G
# #
G - # T, O, H
Telegram 100.000.000+ Line # - # O||T, H
Slack 10.000.000+ Viber # # - # T, O, H
KakaoTalk G
# - # O, H, 6T
Telegram G
# #
G G
# #
G - # O||T, 6H
TABLE II: List of platforms Slack G
# #
G G
# #
G - # O, T, 6H
TABLE III: Characterization of the link preview creation. For
the visible features, we use “ ” when we observed a field in
while, on the one hand, being undetected by possible active or all of our experiments, “#” when we never observed a field,
passive detection systems put in place by the hosting platform and “G#” when the presence of the field depends on the context,
and, on the other hand, misleading the users, who make use e.g., meta tags or user edits. We use “DP” for dereferal page,
of the link preview to decide whether to click. To this end, the “SU” for shortened URL, and URL for the shared URL. For
attacker creates a mismatch between the malicious content in the priority, we use “O” for Open Graph, “T” for Twitter Cards,
the page and its benign-looking link preview, by including in and “H” for standard HTML tags.
the attacker’s code specific meta tags.
Victim — The victim of these attacks can be a specific
individual or small group of individuals (i.e., targeted attack),
or as many users as possible, indiscriminately. For the analysis
of this paper, we consider skilled and experienced social We conducted our experiments on social networks us-
network users—a category of users who is less prone to click ing Firefox (version 69.0 for Ubuntu 18.04), Chrome
on malicious URLs [27], [8], [17], [38]. (77.0.3865.75 for Ubuntu 18.04) and Brave Software (0.68.132
based on Chromium 76.0.3809.132 for Ubuntu 18.04)
III. C HARACTERIZING L INK P REVIEW C REATION browsers. For IMs, we purchased two mobile phone SIM cards
and used two different mobile phones for our experiments, i.e.,
In essence, link previews synthesize a web page, creating an iPhone 5S (OS version 12.4.1) and an Android Pixel device
the expectation on what the user would see when clicking (OS version Android 9).
on the preview. The analysis of this section intends to shed
some light on the ways social media platforms create link
previews. This analysis reviews the content of previews of a
set of test web pages, and identifies precisely the fields that are To serve our test pages, we set up an Internet-facing
displayed and under which circumstances. After presenting a web server serving resources over different subdomains. We
comprehensive overview of link preview creation, our analysis used one subdomain for each social media platform and each
studies the network traffic to retrieve the resources to build experiment, achieving a high degree of isolation among the
the link preview, looking for distinctive features that can be experiments on one platform and across all platforms. Also,
used to discover social media platforms’ requests. Finally, our we configured our web server to deliver test pages only when
analysis investigates the extent to which the coherence between accessed via one of the unique subdomains and not through
previews and web pages content holds. our public IP address, reducing the noise caused by bots
of search engines and rogue web scans. All web pages of
Experimental Setup: For the analysis of this section, we our experiments contain a unique page title, text paragraphs,
prepared a set of controlled experiments. Our experiments in- and one image. Depending on the specific test, web pages
volve a user submitting links of test web pages we control, and can contain Open Graph and Twitter Cards meta tags in
another user observing the created link preview. Accordingly, different combinations. We detail the content of meta tags in
we registered two user accounts for each platform. Facebook the corresponding subsection below. Finally, we logged the
is the only platform offering test accounts, which are users main fields of the HTTP requests incoming to the server, for
separated from regular users. further analysis.
4
Facebook LinkedIn, VK, Viber Twitter, MeWe, Skype Instagram Telegram, Slack Tumblr Messenger, Kakao
Xing Medium Snapchat Pinterest Plurk Whatsapp Line
TABLE IV: Color-coded link preview layouts grouped by visual similarity, i.e., same field order and position. Color coding: Red
is for the domain name, green for the image, yellow for the site title, purple for the site description, and blue for the URL.
A. Displayed Information fail in showing an image when, for example, the linked web
page does not include the meta tag for images.
Link previews intend to summarize the content of the
embedded links, by showing a site name, an image, and a brief When looking at the shared URL field, we observed a
description of the web page’s content, typically. These fields noticeable difference between social networks and instant
originate from the web page’s HTML code, either from the messaging platforms. As opposed to IMs, none of the social
standard HTML tags or from ad-hoc meta tags such as Open networks shows the shared URL in the preview. However, we
Graph or Twitter Cards markups. The goal of this section is need to clarify that IMs do not have a dedicated field for the
learning the exact information shown to a user across different URL. Instead, by default, IMs show the URL in the textbox
social media platforms, and tracing back the content of each of the user’s message.
preview field to the web page.
Finally, the content of link previews varies with the
To that end, we defined a set of controlled experiments presence of meta tags. Across all platforms, a total of 25
by posting links to resources hosted on our web server, and fields are not present in the link preview when the linked
observing the resulting link preview. As the link preview could web page does not include any meta tag, i.e., the web page
show data originating from both standard HTML tags and contains only standard HTML tags. Such behavior may be
meta tags, we created web pages with Open Graph or Twitter caused by shortcomings of HTML parser, or more probably,
meta tags, both meta tags at the same time, and no meta tags. by intentional decisions of the developers due to the cost of
When creating our test pages, we used unique values (i.e., processing a large number of web pages.
titles, descriptions, and images) for each of the meta tags to
allow us to identify the exact source of the data values used b) Heterogeneous Link Preview Templates: When visit-
by the preview creation. Also, we intend to study the ways the ing Table III per platform, one can observe that only nine plat-
link preview may change for pages delivered with redirections. forms out of 20 (Facebook, VK, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Medium,
Accordingly, we repeated our experiments using server-side Messenger, Snapchat, Line and Viber) create link previews
and client-side redirections. Table III summarizes the result of with a consistent number and types of fields, regardless the
our analysis. presence of meta tags. However, when looking at the variety
of fields shown across these nine platforms, we observe four
1) Visible Features: We start our analysis by pinpointing different sets of fields indicating that there may not be an
the exact fields that social media platforms include in link pre- accepted consensus on which fields constitute a link preview.
views and their location. Table III, columns “Visible Features”, For example, the previews created by Facebook and Medium
lists the displayed fields that we observed. We say that a link include all fields except for the shared URL, which is instead
preview field is visible (“ ”) when the field is present in all present in Messenger. VK, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Viber show
previews created during our experiments. We say that a link only site title, image, and hostname, whereas both Pinterest and
preview field is not visible (“#”) when the field is not present Line show a different subset of fields each (Pinterest’s title and
in any link preview of our experiments. Finally, we say that description have to be user-provided at posting time).
a field may be visible (symbol “G #”) when at least one link
preview shows that field. Table IV shows the position of each Then, the preview created by the remaining eleven plat-
field per platform. forms varies with the presence of meta tags. Interestingly, the
absence of these fields is not consistent within the same plat-
a) Inconsistent Use and Position of Fields: All plat- form. Only three platforms (Twitter, Telegram, and Slack) fail
forms include a different combination of the following fields: to build a preview of pages containing only standard HTML
title of the web page, description of the web page, an image, tags. The previews of the other eight platforms incoherently
the domain name, and the shared URL. We observed that there display fields. For example, Instagram shows only the title and
is no regular usage of these fields and that there is no field that the shared URL of pages with only HTML tags.
is always displayed. The ones that are presented by most of
the platforms are the site title (16 over 20 platforms) and the Finally, when looking at the visual position of field in the
hostname (14 platforms). Then, interestingly, the image field preview, we identified 14 distinct template layouts. Table IV
is not shown all the times, and 11 platforms out of 20 may lists the layouts we observed, grouping layouts by same order
5
of fields and position. User Agents IPs
Name # UAs Org. Bot # ASN Res. Prov.
2) Priority: The second part of our analysis studies the Facebook 2 1 1 1 0 1
behavior of the platforms when processing web pages with VK 1 0 1 1 0 1
multiple meta tags and without meta tags. The goal of this Twitter 1 0 1 1 0 1
analysis is to learn the importance assigned to each field. LinkedIn 1 0 1 1 0 1
Table III, columns “Priority”, summarizes our findings. We Tumblr 1 0 1 1 0 1
Pinterest 2 1 1 1 0 1
use the letter H for standard HTML tags, the letter O for the Xing 3 0 3 2 0 2
Open Graph meta tags, and the letter T for Twitter Cards. The MeWe 1 0 1 1 0 1
three letters are ordered from left to right by priority. When Plurk 1 0 1 1 0 1
we cannot establish a clear priority, e.g., the preview contains Medium 5 0 5 2 0 2
a mix of tags, we use the symbol “||”. We cross a letter when Instagram 12 9 3 1 0 1
the type of tag is never used for the preview. Messenger 6 3 3 1 0 1
Skype 2 1 1 1 0 1
Our analysis reveals that, with few exceptions, the content Snapchat 3 0 3 2 1 1
of link previews originates predominantly from the meta tags, WhatsApp 2 0 2 1 1 0
Line 3 2 1 2 0 2
even when they differ from the content of the page. For exam- Viber 1 0 1 1 1 0
ple, concerning the hostname field, Facebook, Messenger and KakaoTalk 2 1 1 2 0 2
WhatsApp show the domain name of the URL of the og:url Telegram 1 0 1 1 0 1
meta tag even when it differs from the URL hosting the Slack 3 0 3 2 0 2
resource. We observed similar behavior with Xing, Telegram,
and Slack, that show the content of the og:site_name meta TABLE V: Analysis of access logs considering IP and User-
tag in the host field. A few platforms, i.e., Pinterest and VK, Agent for each social media platform
directly prompt the user for text for the preview when the
platforms fail at rendering the link preview.
Finally, we observe that Open Graph is, by far, the most by concealing the URL of the final page with a redirections.
used markup language for link previews. Open Graph is also We implemented both server-side redirections with 303 and
the first one displayed by all platforms except for three, i.e., 307 status codes, and client-side redirections either via HTML
Twitter, Skype and Viber. While Twitter Cards seems to be tags or via JavaScript code. The results of our analysis are not
rarely used by social networks, it has a bigger userbase among in Table III, and we report them in this section briefly. All
IMs, where only two platforms (Messenger and KakaoTalk) do platforms correctly handle server-side redirections. Facebook
not seem to support it. is the only platform supporting client-side redirections (both
HTML and JavaScript ones). Overall, the link preview does
3) User Actions: The third analysis of this section involves not differ significantly from the previews created when posting
fields that a user can inspect only upon an action. We identified direct links.
two of such fields (see, Table III, columns “User Actions”).
The first field is the URL shown when the user moves B. Network Signatures
the mouse over the link preview. Typically, when moving the
mouse over an anchor tag, the browser shows in the status After analyzing the displayed information, we look for
bar the hyperlink. Social networks respect such an expected unique signatures in the incoming HTTP requests. Our goal
behavior; however, 50% of the social networks do not show is to identify distinguishing features that can be used by the
the original URL in the status bar but prefer showing either owner of a web page to determine when the incoming request
a shortened URL (“SU”) or a dereferer page (“DP”). By originates from a social media platform. For this analysis, we
dereferer page we indicate a social network-specific proxy process the entries in our server log files to identify such
interposed between the user and the shared web page, e.g. signatures.
as a click aggregator. In general, when sharing URLs to our pages on social
The second field is specific only to Facebook and Mes- networks, we should expect that other users may click on
senger. Within the link preview, both platforms show an the link previews, introducing spurious entries in our logs. To
additional UI button—called ”Context Button”4 —to display avoid the presence of user activities, we limited the visibility
a dialog box with additional information about the domain of our posts whenever a platform supports such a feature. Only
name of the og:url tag. Such additional information, when two platforms do not support access restrictions, i.e., Medium
available, includes (i) content from Wikipedia, (ii) domain and Plurk; however, upon manual inspection, we verified our
name registration date from the WHOIS database, (iii) a link logs did not contain any user activity but only requests from
to the Facebook page associated to the domain name, (iv) the both platforms. Finally, we point out that the same concern
number of times that link was shared, and (v) a map showing does not apply for IMs as messages are visible only to the
the locations on earth of users who shared the link. recipient, that, in our setting, is another user under our control.
4) Page redirections: The final analysis of this section stud- From our log files, we parsed all entries and ex-
ies the link preview generation when pages are delivered with tracted the user-agent strings and the IPs. We compared
redirections. For that, we repeated the previous experiments user-agent strings against known strings for browsers, and
we looked for substrings that can be used to identify
4 See, https://www.facebook.com/help/publisher/1004556093058199 a platform uniquely. An example of these substrings is
6
“facebookexternalhit” for Facebook or “vkShare; D. Takeaway
+http://vk.com/dev/Share” for VK. When the user
agent contains such unique strings, we classify the entry as bot. The analysis of this section shed some light on three key
When the user-agent string matches one of the known user- aspects of social media platforms when creating a link preview.
agent strings of browsers, we classify the entry as organic. To summarize, this section makes the following findings:
Then, starting from the collected IPs, we resolved the au- • Social media platforms rely unconditionally on meta
tonomous system numbers (ASNs) and searched the AS name tags for rendering previews, especially on the Open
strings for unique substrings. For example, Facebook’s re- Graph markup language. When meta tags are not
quest originate from AS 32934, whose name is “Facebook, present, link previews display fields in an inconsistent
Inc.”. However, not all platforms manage an autonomous manner, exposing users to a great variety of heteroge-
system, but they may be relying on third-party providers. For neous link preview templates. As a result of all this, we
example, Pinterest’s requests originate from AS 14618, whose speculate that users are misled into taking the wrong
name is “Amazon AES”. When the autonomous system name security decision. Also, the heterogeneity of templates
matches the name of a platform or a known network provider, and inconsistent use of fields may fail in building a
we classify the entry as a service provider. secure mental model of link preview outlooks.
Table V summarizes the results of our analysis. All the • Platforms’ requests contain distinguishable signatures
20 social media platforms under test use at least one user that can be used by web sites owners to determine
agent string linked to the name of the company or the service when a request originates from social media platforms.
itself, allowing for immediate traffic filtering. Of these, 13 This is a required feature to enable cloaking attacks.
platforms use only one user-agent header, and seven platforms
(Xing, Medium, Instagram, Messenger, Snapchat, Whatsapp • The temporal analysis reveals that platforms tend to
and Slack) use multiple ones. Seven platforms (Facebook, fetch the resources for the link preview very rarely
Pinterest, Instagram, Messenger, Skype, Line, and KakaoTalk) over a period of 14 days. A longer time window may
request web pages using user-agent strings that are indis- show a different behavior, however, it should be noted
tinguishable from browsers, posing a potential problem for that 14 days is sufficient for a successful malicious
the identification. However, the analysis of the IPs and the campaign.
ASes provides a stronger signal than user-agents. As a matter
of fact, all platforms perform HTTP requests from IPs of IV. M ALICIOUS C ONTENT AND U SER AWARENESS
either one or two autonomous systems that can be linked
to the platforms. Three instant messaging apps (Whatsapp, Section III studied the behavior of social media platforms
Snapchat, Viber) request resources directly from the user’s when sharing links to benign web content. However, as ob-
phone, slightly increasing the difficulty in distinguishing if the served by prior work, adversaries can also share malicious
visitor is organic or not, as the AS usually is from a residential content on social media platforms such as phishing pages (see,
area; nonetheless, all three of them include the app name in the e.g., [29], [32]). Anecdotal evidence suggests that social media
user-agent string, so we can categorize the respective entries platforms, social networks in particular, may have deployed
as bots. defenses to counter the spread of malicious content in their
systems. For example, Twitter claims to match shared links
against a database of potentially harmful URLs [36] and to
additionally use their shortening service to interpose informa-
C. Link Preview Coherence tive safeguarding pages in between https://t.co links and
The final analysis of this section investigates the coherence their malicious targets. Facebook reports the employment of
between the link preview and the web page. In particular, we dedicated teams and tools against spam on the platform [12],
are interested in studying the ways social media platforms as well as anti-virus measures in the file upload and download
keep up to date the link previews in which a page changes processes [10].
over time. To this end, we generated new, unique URLs, The second analysis of this paper studies the presence
one for each platform, and posted them. Then, we developed and effectiveness of possible deployed countermeasures when
a bot controlling a pool of web browsers which is visiting sharing malicious URLs. Also, our analysis reviews the created
periodically (every 30m) the platforms’ pages showing the link previews to evaluate to what extent users may be aware
preview, over a period of 14 days. As IMs messages are of the risk of clicking on previews of malicious links. In this
expected to be short lived, we did not consider them for these section, we leverage on the knowledge acquired during the
experiments. observations of Section III, which we will use as a behavioral
baseline to compare social media platforms behavior when
The analysis of our logs revealed that eight out of 10 social dealing with malicious content. Our focus is not built on the
networks request the page at least once on the submission attacker’s perspective, rather on the observation of existing
date, and never again. Twitter and Pinterest are two exceptions, active or passive countermeasures preventing the distribution
requesting the web page multiple times across a period of 14 of malicious content; the most fitting scenario is the one of
days. For what concerns the associated resources, seven social malware and phishing spread prevention.
networks requested them only once at submission time, and
never again. The remaining three platforms, i.e., Facebook, Experimental Setup: The experiments of this section
Twitter and LinkedIn, request the link preview images more involve sharing links to two types of malicious content to
regularly. check for the presence of different countermeasures. First,
7
Sharing Type Social Networks Instant Messengers
KakaoTalk
Messenger
WhatsApp
Instagram
Facebook
Telegram
Snapchat
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Medium
Tumblr
Twitter
MeWe
Skype
Slack
Viber
Plurk
Xing
Line
Vk
Test Resource Observ.
Direct Virut/EICAR Posted - - - - - - - - - -
Preview # H
# # #
H H
# # # H
# - - - - - - - - - -
Blacklisted URL Posted × - -
Preview # × H
# - - # #
Client Red. Virut/EICAR Posted - - - - - - - - -
Preview # - - - - - - - - -
Blacklisted URL Posted - -
Preview - -
Server Red. Virut/EICAR Posted - - - - - - - - - -
Preview # H
# # #
H H
# # # H
# - - - - - - - - - -
Blacklisted URL Posted × - -
Preview # # H
# #
H - - H
# # #
TABLE VI: Test results when sharing a malware and a blacklisted URL.
we want to test platforms against the presence of URL fil- a) Malware: When sharing the malware program, all
tering mechanisms. For example, a social network may check platforms correctly retrieved the binary from our server. How-
whether the shared URL is flagged as malicious by existing ever, as the binary program does not contain HTML code,
URL blacklists, e.g., Google SafeBrowsing [14]. Accordingly, platforms tend to render a bare-minimum link preview (i.e.,
we searched for URLs on PhishTank [23] and verified that Facebook, Xing), possibly prompting the user to provide more
the URLs are also blacklisted by Google SafeBrowsing [14]. information (i.e., VK, Pinterest, Tumblr, and MeWe) or render
We used a total of three different blacklisted URLs across no preview at all (i.e., Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Plurk).
platforms, all with the same characteristics, due to their short Also, all platforms did not show any error message or warning,
uptime before being deactivated. Second, we want to check and, clicking on the link preview results in downloading the
whether platforms proactively scan the content of web pages malware program.
for malicious content. To this end, we created unique links to
b) Blacklisted URL: When sharing a blacklisted
our server to download the trojan Win32.Virut. For IMs, we
URL, only one platform, i.e., LinkedIn, detected
did not perform such an experiment as downloading mobile
the malicious URL after posting. Here, LinkedIn
apps through a browser is not a major attack vector.
modified the text of the link to point to a
When running our tests, we also monitored the exact point redirector page (linkedin.com/redir/phishing-
where we can observe the effects of any countermeasures. In page?url=$U RL). When a user clicks on the preview,
our analysis, we considered two points: when posting the URL, Linkedin shows an informative page explaining that the site
and when creating the link preview. Table VI shows the result was blacklisted according to Google Safe Browsing, thus
of our analysis. blocking access to the target URL. In spite of repeated
attempts, the user account was not deactivated.
Sixteen social media platforms over 18 treated the black-
A. URL Posting listed links as regular links: their bots visit the page and render
a preview based on the specified meta tags (if any) or fall back
The first aspect that we monitored during the execution
to parsing HTML, when possible. Eight social media platforms
of our experiments is whether the platform accepts malicious
(Facebook, VK, MeWe for SNs and Messenger, Snapchat,
URLs. Only Twitter detected the blacklisted URL as malicious
Line, Viber, KakaoTalk for IMs) created a rich preview with no
and prevented posting altogether. Also, Twitter showed a warn-
distinguishable difference from a regular innocuous link. The
ing message: This request looks like it might be automated. To
remaining eight platforms either showed partial information
protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we
(page title and host, but no image and no description) or did
can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later. All
not render a preview at all, due to their implementation.
other platforms did not show any error or warning messages
and created a URL preview instead.
C. Takeaway
The analysis of this section intends to investigate the
B. Preview Creation presence of possible mechanisms to prevent the distribution
of malicious URLs on social media platforms. To summarize,
Social media platforms can detect malicious URLs in later our analysis makes the following findings:
stages of the URL processing pipeline, e.g., when fetching the
resources. However, our analysis revealed that the vast majority • In general, our experiments could not find evidence
of platforms do not seem to implement any security check. of widespread use of countermeasures to prevent the
8
distribution of malicious content at submission time. Crafted Fields Bypass Attacker
Blacklisted URL
• All platforms—except for Twitter and LinkedIn—
Shared URL
Server Red.
do not show specific warnings or error messages to
Client Red
Site descr.
Site title
the users, indicating potential danger when clicking
Image
Host
on the previews. Also, link previews for blacklisted
URLs can contain the same semantic elements that Name Capability
are typical of previews of benign web pages, i.e., title, Facebook u u u u - - - 3 Page cnt.
description, a picture, and the domain name. Twitter u u u 3 - 3 - 3 Domain
VK u - u 3 - - - 3 Domain
• Two out of 20 social media platforms perform security LinkedIn u - u 3 - - 3 3 Domain
checks on the posted URL. For example, LinkedIn Pinterest - - u 3 - - - 3 Domain
Tumblr u u u 3 - - - 3 Domain
uses the Google Safe Browsing API to detect mali- Medium u u u 3 - - - - Domain
cious URLs. While Twitter forbids posting blacklisted Xing u u u u - - - 3 Page cnt.
URLs, LinkedIn accepts the URLs, but it replaces the Plurk u - u - - - - - Page cnt.
URL in the preview with a link to an own warning MeWe u u u 3 - - - 3 Domain
page. Instagram u u u - 3 - - 3 Domain
Messenger u u u u 3 - - 3 Domain
• Twitter and LinkedIn are the only two platforms Snapchat u - u 3 - - - 3 Domain
implementing a form of defense. However, we could WhatsApp u u u u 3 - - 3 Domain
bypass these defenses by using server- and client-side Skype u u u 3 - - - 3 Domain
redirections. Line u u u - 3 - - 3 Domain
Viber u - u 3 - - - 3 Domain
KakaoTalk u u u 3 3 - - 3 Domain
V. ATTACKS Telegram u u u u 3 - - 3 Domain
Slack u u u u u - - 3 Page cnt.
So far, we studied the behaviors of social media platforms
when processing both benign and malicious webpages, and we TABLE VII: Summary of the evaluation of our attacks. We
learned the various ways platforms could create link previews use “u” when the attacker can change a field via HTML tags.
and validate URLs. This section will take a look at the link We use “3” when the attacker can replace the value of a field
preview creation from an adversarial point of view. Here, we via the domain name of the malicious URL. We use “3” when
consider an attacker who intends to lure one or more users to a bypass technique and attack succeeded. Finally, we use “-
visit a malicious webpage that is distributed over social media ” when the field is not present or when we did not test the
platforms. To do so, the attacker needs to hide their malicious platform.
intent by using, ideally, a benign-looking link preview. At
the same time, as platforms may be validating URLs against
blacklists, the attacker needs to avoid the detection of mali-
cious URLs. In this section, we consider both problems. First, 1) Crafting Fields: We evaluate the replacement of the
in Section V-A, we present a set of shortcomings of social preview fields considering two types of attacker models. The
media platforms that allow attackers with different capabilities first one is a person that can create malicious web pages and
to craft arbitrary link previews, regardless of the actual content upload them on a web server. This setting intends to model the
or purpose of the shared page. Then, in Section V-B, we show common scenario where the attacker exploits vulnerabilities
how an attacker can bypass URL validation countermeasures. in existing servers or web applications to upload malicious
We summarize our attacks in Table VII. Overall, our content such as phishing pages. Since this attacker controls the
results show that all platforms are vulnerable to our attacks— web page content, they can modify the title, the description,
except for two (Plurk and Medium) that we did not test with and the images with ones of their choice. Here, the attacker can
malicious URLs as they cannot limit the visibility of posts. store the selected values in the meta tags or the standard HTML
Four platforms, i.e., Facebook, Xing, Plurk, and Slack, can be tags. In Table VII, we mark these field with “u”. However,
attacked by attackers who control the content of a webpage such an attacker may not be able to alter the content of the
only. The remaining platforms are vulnerable to attackers who domain name and the shared URL.
can also register domain names for the server distributing The second type of attacker possesses the capabilities of the
malicious pages. previous attacker and extends them with the ability to register
domain names. This scenario intends to model the typical
A. Adversarial Analysis of the Link Previews Creation attacker that registers fraudulent domain names to support
The goal consists in creating a malicious web page whose their malicious activities. Being able to register domain names
preview, when shared on social media platforms, is similar extends the abilities of the previous attacker as it allows for
to the preview of a benign webpage, requiring an attacker to crafting the domain name and shared URL too.
be able to replace the content of each field with ones of their In the remainder, we present our analysis, discussing in
choice. In this section, we study the extent to which an attacker detail what an attacker could do to change the content of these
can arbitrarily influence the link preview creation considering two fields. We grouped our results in five distinct classes based
two attackers with different capabilities, i.e., a first one that on the observed behaviors:
controls the content of a web page and an another one that
can also register domain names. Table VII shows the results a) Link Previews without Domain Name: One platform,
of our analysis. i.e., Plurk, does not include any information regarding the
9
landing page URL, i.e., neither the domain name nor the
original URL. In this case, the creation of a crafted link
preview is straightforward. An example of preview for Plurk
is Figure 3b.
Instagram and Line do not show the domain name either.
However, we point out that they show the original URL. In
our experiments, we could not find a way to remove or replace
the string of the shared URL from the preview. Accordingly,
it can be changed only by an attacker who has full control of
the URL string.
b) Replacing Domain Name using og:url: In Face- (c) Facebook
book, we observed that when the URL of the shared webpage
mismatches the og:url meta tag, the preview fields title,
image, description and host are retrieved from the webpage
hosted at the URL specified in the og:url meta tag rather (a) Slack
than in the shared one. Nonetheless, the final landing page
remains the URL of the shared web page. In this case, the
attacker can assign to the tag og:url a URL of a benign re-
source, resulting in a preview that is entirely indistinguishable (b) Plurk (d) Xing
from a benign preview. Figure 3c shows such a benign-looking
preview. The Messenger app shows the same behavior, but the
attacker cannot remove the shared URL from the message text; Fig. 3: Examples of maliciously-crafted previews by an at-
due to the mismatch between the shared URL and the preview, tacker who controls the content of a webpage. In all these
we say that this attack is possible only for an attacker that can examples, the shared page does not include the text in de-
register domain names. scription, nor the displayed image.
WhatsApp replaces the content of the host field only,
showing the URL specified in the og:url meta tag. Also in
this case, the shared URL cannot be removed from the message
text, requiring the attacker to register a new domain name for
this purpose.
c) Removing Shared URLs in IMs: One IM platform,
i.e., Slack, permits the editing of the content of sent messages.
We verified that a user could edit the URL string of a message (c) Messenger
too, after the creation of the preview, effectively eliminating
this field from the rendered preview. The platforms Snapchat,
Skype and Viber remove the URL from the message text after
posting, although we observe that they include the domain
name in the preview, which is extracted directly from the
shared URL. We could not find a way to replace the domain
name with an arbitrary string. Therefore, this attack may not
be successful for an attacker controlling the webpage content
only. (a) Twitter (b) Tumblr (d) Telegram
d) Replacing Domain using og:site_name: During
our experiments, we discovered that three platforms, i.e., Xing, Fig. 4: Examples of crafted previews that always show the
Telegram and Slack, replace the domain name with the content domain name. The red box shows the position of the domain
of the og:site_name meta tag. name.
As mentioned before, Slack allows removing the shared
URL from the message text after posting the link. Accordingly,
an attacker can generate a preview that looks like a benign one
Telegram includes the shared URL that we could not remove.
only by controlling the HTML code of the page. Figure 3a
Accordingly, the creation of a Telegram’s preview is more
shows an example of such a link preview.
suitable for an attacker that can register domain names.
Xing does not include the original URL; therefore, con-
trolling the web page content is sufficient to craft a URL 2) Attacks: To summarize, our analysis shows that it is
preview where the domain name is replaced with the site name. possible to create an attack against each platform. Our attacks
Figure 3d shows such a link preview. can create entirely indistinguishable link previews against four
platforms, i.e., Facebook, Xing, Plurk, and Slack, by changing
Then, replacing the domain name of Telegram’s preview only the content of the malicious web page. In three cases,
with the og:site_name meta tag may not be sufficient as the attacker needs to exploit seemingly innocuous behaviors of
10
the platforms to achieve their goal. For example, on Facebook, A. Variety of Layouts and Processing Rules Can Lead to
the attacker can replace the domain name with the domain of Underestimate the Risk
og:url meta tag, whereas for Xing and Slack, the attacker
can replace the domain name by using the og:site_name Our results show a great variety of layouts used by the plat-
tag. As Slack includes the shared URL too, the attacker can forms under evaluation. We distinguished 14 distinct templates
also remove the original URL from the preview after its for link previews. Also, we observed that the same platform
creation. We point out that, in all these four cases, even when could create many variants of the same template, for example,
the attacker replaces or hides the domain names and the shared by removing or replacing fields.
URLs, the landing pages, i.e., the malicious pages, of the link The variety that we observed suggests that there is no gen-
preview remain unchanged. When the attacker controls the eral consensus on (i) which fields constitute a link preview, (ii)
domain name, then the remaining platforms can be targeted under which circumstances fields are displayed, and (iii) the
as well. Figure 4 show examples of partially crafted link processing rules and priority. The lack of consensus can have a
previews. The areas in red contain either the domain name or dramatic impact on the way users evaluate the trustworthiness
the original URL. Finally, the evaluation for two platforms, of a preview. As users can be exposed to different layouts,
i.e., Medium and Plurk, was limited to the generation of they may neglect the importance of a field, underestimating
the previews. On these two platforms, we did not share any the overall security risks of a link.
malicious URLs as they cannot restrict the visibility of the
shared content. (R1) Standardize Content and Construction Rules of Link
Previews: Our first recommendation is to define and agree on
the content of link previews, and the exact rules to construct
B. Bypassing Countermeasures them.
When sharing malicious content, social media platforms B. Distrustful Scenario
may detect the maliciousness of the shared web page. As
shown in Section IV, only two platforms can detect when The scenario in which social platforms operate is charac-
a URL is known to be distributing malware by using, e.g., terized by distrust. On the one hand, social platforms cannot
Google Safe Browsing [14]. In this section, we focus on these verify the truthfulness of webpages content. For example,
two platforms and show that, despite the efforts of validating they cannot decide whether an image or a title is appropriate
URLs, it is possible to bypass these controls by creating ad- for a given page. Accordingly, social platforms cannot trust
hoc web pages. In this page, we consider two approaches that webpages. On the other hand, users can leverage on their
are based on the findings of Sections III-A4 and III-B. own experiences and skills to navigate the web and inspect
both URLs and the circumstances that led them to see those
1) Redirections: During our experiments of Section III-A4, URLs looking for warning signals, indicating that pages may
we observed that all platforms except for one (Facebook) do be dangerous. Experienced users may be trusting webpages
not support HTTP redirections. As a result, those platforms they are familiar with, e.g., their web email provider; however,
may not be able to determine the next URL in the redi- in the general case, they will not trust any page.
rection chain, and accordingly, they should fail in verifying
whether the URL is malicious. We tested our hypothesis and In a scenario with these trust relationships, social media
confirmed that client-side redirections could effectively bypass platforms act as intermediaries between web pages and users,
both Twitter and LinkedIn URL validation. The evaluation with providing to the latter syntheses of the former. In playing such
redirections is summarized in Table VI. a role, social platforms should avoid introducing interpretations
of the content of the webpages or using processing rules
However, interestingly, we also found out that it is possible that can hide or distort the preview of the page. Also, social
to bypass the URL filtering of LinkedIn with a server-side platforms should enforce the presence of security-relevant
redirection, i.e., 30x response. Here, we suspect that LinkedIn fields that users can use to decide whether to click, i.e., domain
does not validate the Location header of the HTTP response names, and original URLs. While most of the social platforms
sent by the redirector. under test include a domain name or the original URL, four
of them, i.e., Facebook, Xing, Plurk, and Slack do not satisfy
2) Link Cloaking: As a final step, an attacker may resort such a requirement. From the analysis of these four platforms,
to cloaking attacks. The analysis Section III-B showed that we derive the following recommendations:
the source IP and the user agent strings of the social media
platforms are unique, and an attacker can leverage on these (R2) Show Domain or URL: As reported in Table III and
features to change the behavior of the servers selectively. For further detailed in Section V-A1a, the link preview created
example, when the incoming request matches one of the known by the social network Plurk does not include any host field,
signatures, the server will deliver the benign web page for link and there is no URL in the post text. As this information is
preview creation. Otherwise, the server delivers the malicious significant in assessing the trustworthiness of the link preview,
web page. we include as part of our recommendations that link previews
must include either the domain name or the shared URL.
Among the platforms under evaluation, only Plurk does not
VI. D ISCUSSION AND R ECOMMENDATIONS comply with our recommendation.
In this section, we discuss our results and distill a set (R3) Limit Edits of Posts or Refresh Previews: Platforms
of recommendations for social media platforms towards the may want to allow users to edit previous posts. In these cases,
creation of more reliable link previews. they should forbid changing the shared URLs. Alternatively,
11
HTML title
Listing (2) Example of Malicious Page Shared on Slack (a) Rendered Preview
Fig. 5: Example of Malicious Link Preview.
when changing the URL is admitted, platforms should re-build not all browsers could show Google Safe Browsing warn-
the link preview and replace the old preview with the new ing messages before loading malicious URLs. In particular,
one. In our experiments, and in particular in Section V-A1c, we verified that the in-app browsers as used per default
we observed that Slack allows users to remove URLs from configuration by Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Line, Insta-
previous messages without updating the link preview. This gram, and WhatsApp (both on Android and iOS) do not
feature can be misused as shown in Figure 3a, especially if show any warning when loading our phishing URLs. Also,
the domain name field contains an arbitrary string rather than we verified that external browser apps might not reliably
the actual domain or URL. show Safe Browsing warnings. We reproduced such behavior
on Chrome Browser 76.0.3809.123 for iOS 12.4.1, Chrome
(R4) Create Preview Without Retrieving Referred Pages: for Android (Android 9,Pixel Build/PQ3A.190801.002 and
Platforms should create link previews using data items con- Pixel 2 Build/PQ3A.190801.002), Safari (12.1.2 Mobile),
tained in the code of the landing page. When the landing Brave Browser for Android (1.3.2 based on Chromium
page contains external links such as og:url, platforms could 76.0.3809.132), and Firefox Focus for Android (8.0.16). Only
consider such resources as long as they are in the same domain one mobile browser, i.e., Firefox for Android (68.1), showed
as the landing page. Furthermore, platforms should not use the warning correctly. We point out that we used the default
such URLs to build the entire preview. In Section V-A1b, we configuration of both all tested apps and the operating systems.
observed that Facebook creates the entire preview by using Finally, desktop browsers were more consistent than the mobile
the content of the URL in the og:url tag, and an attacker ones in showing the warning. Here, we tested Chrome Browser
can hide a malicious webpage by creating a link preview (77.0.3865.75 for Ubuntu 18.04), Brave Software Browser
with a YouTube video using only the og:url meta tag (see, (0.68.132 based on Chromium 76.0.3809.132 for Ubuntu
Figure 5a). 18.04), and Firefox (69.0 for Ubuntu 18.04). Independent non-
(R5) Type Fields: In Section III-A2 we observed that, in a academic research confirmed the presence of a discrepancy
few social platforms, it is possible to override the content of between Google Safe Browsing mobile and desktop. See, for
the domain name field by adding the og:site_name meta example, [26], [19].
tag. When the platform additionally does not include the shared
URL in the text field of the post, as observed in Section V-A1d The reasons for such a discrepancy are not fully under-
for the social network Xing, the final link preview contains stood, and further research is required. Nevertheless, such
no trusted information on the URL, as the domain field can results indicate that browsers may fail to or will not detect ma-
contain an arbitrary string. Therefore, we recommend that licious URLs, and, accordingly, browser-side countermeasures
each field of a link preview should have a well-defined type, should not be considered as a bulletproof last line of defense.
e.g., image, description, title, domain, and URL. Then, when Based on that, we recommend developers to implement up-
creating a preview, platforms should not use the content of a stream URL validation during the generation of link previews.
field of type t1 to fill a field of a different type t2 . Among the 20 platforms we verified, only two implement such
a mechanism.
C. Upstream vs Downstream URL Validation (R7) Do Proper URL Validation: An HTTP agent can reach
During the lifetime of a link preview, there are different web resources by following chains of redirections. While in the
points in time when malicious links can be detected, e.g., when past redirections were only implemented via HTTP response
platforms accept the URL and when users click on the preview. codes and the refresh HTML meta tag, nowadays redirections
In the remaining, we discuss where and how such a check are also implemented via JavaScript code. When validating
should be enforced. URLs, it is fundamental that all URLs of a redirection chain
are validated as well. Unfortunately, the only two platforms
(R6) Do Upstream URL Validation: When testing social implementing a form of URL validation (Twitter and LinkedIn)
media platforms against phishing URLs, we observed that did not validate URLs during redirections, allowing attackers
12
to bypass their countermeasures. Table VI sums up the results impersonate existing institutions or services (e.g. banks) to dif-
of our experiments with these two social networks. ferent degrees of similarity: replicating the impersonated target
to a high degree increases their chances of success, e.g. through
D. Ethical Considerations the choice of a visually-similar domain, or through reusing
graphics and logos. With the increase in popularity experienced
Our experiments raise the valid ethical concern of sharing by social media platforms, attackers found means to either
malicious content on social media platforms. For example, directly reach targeted victims, also having the possibility to
users not aware of our experiments may click on our previews collect their data and increase the success likelihood, or to get
and become victim of an attack. To avoid attacking users, in touch with large crowds in much broader campaigns. For
we limited the visibility of the shared malicious links of the example, Han et al. [16] mention Facebook among the top-five
platform accounts we control. When the platform did not organizations targeted by phishers, also showing how attackers
support limiting the post visibility, i.e. for the social networks install off-the-shelf phishing kits in compromised web servers,
Medium and Plurk, we did not share the phishing link and, where the attack is active for a short time before being
instead of distributing the Win32.Virut malware, we used the moved to another location. Phishing attacks usually employ a
innocuous EICAR test file, used to test antivirus software. considerable number of redirections, to avoid detection, evade
The second concern of our experiments is sharing malware blacklists and filter traffic. Previous work [29], [31] studied
from our servers. The main risk of these experiments is redirection chains for malicious pages detection, also applied
that both the network and the domain name of our institute in the context of social networks (i.e., Twitter). Detection of
may be blacklisted, affecting the work of the research and phishing pages can also be done by inspecting the content
administration staff. To avoid such a risk, we registered a first- and structure of a webpage (e.g., Pan et al. [24]) or the URL
level domain name and moved our servers on Amazon Web structure (e.g., Chou et al. [7]).
Service EC2. As opposed to this body of works, our study does not
present new detection techniques for phishing pages. How-
VII. R ELATED W ORK ever, similarly to phishing pages, an attacker can create link
In this section, we review works related to our study. previews that are visually similar to benign ones, masking thus
First, we present relevant works in the area of the analysis the malicious intention of the landing page.
of malicious URLs in social networks. Then, we related our
work with the research done in the area of phishing. C. Detection of Malicious Content
As social networks gained popularity, attackers started
A. Analysis of Clicks on Social Platforms using them as a vector to spread malicious URLs, beyond
When deciding whether to click on link previews, users phishing attacks such as drive-by download. The detection of
rely on an ensemble of signals that are displayed by the social these URLs has been the focus of several works. For example,
platform’s web pages. For example, Redmiles et al. [27] show Lee et al. [29] proposed a technique to detect malicious URLs
that users take into account who shares the web content and based on the chains of redirections. Similarly, Thomas et
the online community the content originates from. Similarly to al. [34] presented a technique to evaluate URLs shared not
Redmiles et al. [27], our work intends to shed some light on only on social networks but also on other web services such
the dynamics behind user clicks on social networks. However, as blogs and webmails. In another line of work, the detection of
as opposed to Redmiles et al. [27], our work does not study malicious pages focused on inspecting their content, for both
social connections between users or user properties such as desktop browsers (e.g., Canali et al. [6]) and mobile browsers
demographics. Instead, our work focuses on the content of a (e.g., Amrutkar et al. [1]). As opposed to these works, our
link preview, the trustworthiness of the link preview creation, paper does not present a detection technique, but it studies how
and it explores the extent to which an attacker can control the social platforms behave when preparing previews of malicious
fields displayed to the victims. URLs.
Clicking on maliciously-crafted link previews is a security Finally, in a recent work, Bell et al. [4] measured the
concern that Facebook tackled in 2017 by forbidding users reactivity of the malicious URL detection system of Twitter,
to modify link previews from the web site [28]. Also, an discovering that a significant number of malicious URLs re-
independent work by Barak Tawily [33] showed that Facebook main undetected for at least 20 days. Such a study is orthogonal
link previews can be modified via metatags. Our study expands to the one present in our work, i.e., our work explores the ways
the one by Tawily [33] and shows that motivated attackers social platforms generate previews in an adversarial setting,
can still control the content of a preview by crafting ad- whereas Bell et al. [4] perform measurements on the reactivity
hoc HTML tags of the shared pages. Also, our study shows of countermeasures. Also, to a certain extent, Bell et al. [4]
that the problem is not affecting only Facebook, but it is a underline the severity of the current state of link previews in
systematic problem affecting most of the social platforms that social platforms too.
we evaluated.
D. Cloaking Attacks
B. Phishing in Social Networks
Another area related to our work is the area of cloaking
A typical phishing attack involves an attacker, their victim, attacks. In a cloaking attack, the attacker significantly alters the
and a malicious resource used as a bait, to convince the user web page content when visited by a crawler or bot to conceal
to provide sensitive information. To this end, attackers usually the malicious purpose of the page [40]. When compared to our
13
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