Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged security, xss in 2010

Filters: Year: 2010 × security × xss × Sorted by date


Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?

XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).

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Why do some people disable JavaScript in their browser?

For security reasons.

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Busting frame busting: a study of clickjacking vulnerabilities at popular sites (via) Fascinating and highly readable security paper from the Stanford Web Security Research group. Clickjacking can be mitigated using framebusting techniques, but it turns out that almost all of those techniques can be broken in various ways. Fun examples include double-nesting iframes so that the framebusting script overwrites the top-level frame rather than the whole window, and a devious attack against the IE and Chrome XSS filters which tricks them in to deleting the framebusting JavaScript by reflecting portions of it in the framed page’s URL. The authors suggest a new framebusting snippet that should be more effective, but sadly it relies on blanking out the whole page in CSS and making it visible again in JavaScript, making it inaccessible to browsers with JavaScript disabled. # 24th May 2010, 11:40 am

apache.org incident report for 04/09/2010. An issue was posted to the Apache JIRA containing an XSS attack (disguised using TinyURL), which stole the user’s session cookie. Several admin users clicked the link, so JIRA admin credentials were compromised. The attackers then changed the JIRA attachment upload path setting to point to an executable directory, and uploaded JSPs that gave them backdoor access to the file system. They modified JIRA to collect entered passwords, then sent password reset e-mails to team members and captured the new passwords that they set through the online form. One of those passwords happened to be the same as the user’s shell account with sudo access, leading to a full root compromise of the machine. # 14th April 2010, 9:08 am