Reverse Engineering an Eclipse Plugin | Hacker News Reader

Reverse Engineering an Eclipse Plugin

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135 pointsRKoutnik19 comments

The plugin that is inspected in this article is now delisted in the Eclipse Marketplace. You can't download it from there anymore (Checked with STS 3.9.0.RELEASE). A new fork without the ad related code as been publish and you can inspect the code on https://github.com/ecd-plugin/ecd .

It's nice to see the community stepping in to "fix" the situation.

Original author doing a pretty bad job of explaining himself [0]. Mainly:

Anyone who does not like it, please uninstall this plugin.

I will not explain it anymore.

I'm not interested in stealing your privacy.

[0] https://github.com/cnfree/Eclipse-Class-Decompiler/issues/30

The only acceptable explanation would be that they weren't aware and didn't intend for this to happen.

Any other scenario means that they intentionally and secretly included code into their compiled binaries which posed a security and privacy risk.

I wonder about the nature of this scam. It almost looks like it's designed to spoof ad clicks, not direct the user to them.

Should contact the ad providers, they'd be happy to chargeback with proof of fraud.

From an earlier response in the same thread:

> These codes never worked on user machine. They were used for patching plugin bugs.

Uh huh. If it was such a benign use, why wasn't it in the repository, or mentioned in the marketplace page?

Alternative version:

http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/enhanced-class-decomp...

Good writeup on the reverse engineering.

I'm still a little confused as to what the code was doing, though. It gathers statistics about your user machine (none of which seemed too personal - basically IP, OS, country, etc).

But then what is it doing? Opening a virtual browser or simulating clicks to some ad network?

Seems to me that it is indeed running a hidden browser on a background thread, loading ads, and simulating views/clicks. That is in addition to collecting and sending user and system information (possibly also for ad-serving or information sales or some other nefarious skulduggery).

I wonder if this was actually an attempt to scam the advertisers into thinking they were receiving genuine add traffic, in order to get affiliate revenue. Using actual customer data might have prevented the advertisers from getting suspicious.

By and large, that's exactly what it was doing, getting ad revenue. The second part also sounds plausible, but it would need to use this as the user agent during the actual clicks.

A simple thing would be to trigger a visit to a site using a JS coin miner if it's running JS in the hidden browser.

It would be more efficient and simple to just run a miner in Java.

I'm surprised he wasn't mining bitcoins on the side :)

Guess author of the plugin is pretty smart but not smart enough to encrypt the traffic back home or obscure his/her nasty secrets.

I guess it might be keeping the black stuff for some cool down time just after installation. Many malware seem to do there days. We might have got true clicks targeted.

Encrypting the traffic would only have made it marginally more difficult to intercept (https://portswigger.net/burp/help/proxy_options_installingca...). Also, the guy got 400k downloads, sometimes you don't need "smart".

While this was a popular plugin for Eclipse - I'm sure there are plugins for other editors, IDEs and browsers which do the same (or worse). Yet, we often try a multitude of plugins without a single thought about any unwanted features bundled with the main features.

and so many people make fun of js/node... this dude made over 400k installs part of his personal ad clicking bot net..

Thank you for doing this, makes you think how many other highly rated/used s/w is malicious

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