UPDATE: One of the authors has posted two responses including an apology (accepted). I was taught in grade school that if you plan on writing something, never plagiarize. If you want to republish portions of existing content ensure you properly quote/reference them, and never represent this content as your own original work....
In addition to CGISecurity, I also run a website called QASEC.com where I post SDLC related content. I've just published a lightweight article discussing tips and tricks for tracking software level vulnerabilities in larger organizations. Abstract: "If you work in infosec for a large organization it can be difficult to easily track...
Sacha Faust has published a great article on some of the security checking functionality in Visual Studio. From the article "Anyone doing ASP.NET development probably admits, openly or not, to introducing or stumbling upon a security issue at some point during their career. Developers are often pressured to deliver code as quickly...
An XSS worm has hit twitter this morning and appears to have affected hundreds of thousands of users. Sophos has a good technical writeup at http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2010/09/21/twitter-onmouseover-security-flaw-widely-exploited/ ARSTechnica has some coverage about Magnus Holm, the author of the worm. http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/09/twitter-worms-spread-quickly-thanks-to-blatant-security-flaw.ars I'll update this post once a more accurate count of affected users is...
To commemorate this site turning 10 I've created a list of my top 10 thought provoking/innovate posts that people who haven't been following this site may be unaware of. The Cross-site Scripting FAQ (2001) In 2001 someone informed me of this new threat involving the injection of HTML/Javascript into a site's response...
Ten years ago today I started cgisecurity.com to fill a void in the application security space. At the time no other dedicated site existed, neither OWASP nor WASC had been created, and the www-mobile list was effectively the only place to discuss web related vulns and attacks . When I first started...
For you python developers out there, Craig Younkins sent the following to The Web Security Mailing List (which I moderate) this morning. "I'd like to invite you to a new community - http://www.pythonsecurity.org/ - which is now the central hub for security in Python. We're writing articles on security topics and how...
It appears someone used a combination of XSS on an Apache domain, a url shortener, and an issue tracking system to ultimately lead to rooting of 2 core Apache machines used to host bugzilla, and the main shell server. This is a great breakdown of a real world incident that people rarely...
Larry Suto published a report comparing the various commercial web application security scanners. As you'd expect the vendors are likely to respond about how inaccurate the report is, however in this case both HP and Acunetix argued valid points. From Acunetix "They were not found because Larry didn’t authenticated our scanner (didn’t...
Sullo has sent the following announcement to the full disclosure mailing list indicating a new release of Nikto. "I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of Nikto 2.1.1! Nikto is an open source web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 6100 potentially dangerous files/CGIs,...
Jeremiah Grossman and Bil Corry have created a nice visual mapping between the OWASP Top Ten and the WASC Threat Classification v2. More Information: http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2010/01/wasc-threat-classification-to-owasp-top.html
I am very pleased to announce that the WASC Threat Classification v2 is finally out the door. This project has by far been one of the most challenging, intellectually stimulating projects I've had the chance to work on. I have included the official announcement below. "The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) is...
I currently lead the WASC Threat Classification Project and we're expecting to publish our latest version next month. One of the biggest changes between the TCv2 and TCv1 is that we're doing away with single ways to represent the data. In the TCv1 we had a single tree structure to convey appsec...
"The Web Application Security Consortium is pleased to announce the release of version 1 of the Web Application Security Scanner Evaluation Criteria (WASSEC). The goal of the WASSEC project is to create a vendor-neutral document to help guide information security professionals during web application scanner evaluations. The document provides a comprehensive list...
UPDATE: Reddit has posted a blog entry at http://blog.reddit.com/2009/09/we-had-some-bugs-and-it-hurt-us.html addressing this. "Popular social news website Reddit has stopped the spread of a cross-site scripting (XSS) worm that hit the site on Monday. The XSS worm spread via comments on the site, originally from the account of a user called xssfinder. Reddit failed...
"The 4.0.207.0 release uses a reflective XSS filter that checks each script before it executes to check if the script appears in the request that generated the page. Should it find a match, the script will be blocked. According to Chromium developer Adam Barth, the developers plan to post an academic paper...
i8jesus has posted an entry on smuggling other protocol commands (such as ftp) in HTML forms, as well as edge case situations where running a tcp service (in this case ftp on a non standard port) can result in more XSS abuse cases. While not likely still worth a read. "Most people...
"In case you missed it, the WASC Distributed Open Proxy Honeypot Project launched Phase III at the end of July. We have a few sensors online and as we start gathering data, we are starting our analysis. Our goal is to be able to release "events of interest" to the community to...
"Everyone knows the invaluable XSS cheat sheet maintained by "RSnake". It is all about breaking things and features all the scenarios that can result in XSS. To complement his efforts, there is an excellent XSS prevention cheat sheet created by "Jeff Williams" (Founder and CEO, Aspect Security). As far as I have...
As I recently posted the WASC Threat Classification v2 is currently in a public working state and there's been a buzz on the mailing lists about it compared to other related projects. Vishal Garg posed a question I was expecting for awhile which is why does the TCv2 look so much different...
Here is a sneak peek at the WASC Threat Classification v2.0. We've been working on this for more than a year and it's been a very challenging, educational experience to say the least. Sections that are gray are currently in peer review and are not completed. Mission statement "The Threat Classification v2.0...
"Did you hear the one about the hacker-free e-mail service that was so confident about its enhanced security measure that it offered up $10,000 to anyone who could hack into it? It got hacked. Here’s the part that’s really crazy, though. There was initially some question as to whether or not the...
"McAfee, widely recognized as one of the leading providers of online security software for both home and business, appears to be struggling to secure its own Web sites, which at the time of writing this post, allow anyone with enough tech savvy to covertly do whatever they want on, and with, the...
"During unrelated research, I came across a number of security issues that reside in various parts of Google's web browser - Google Chrome. These issues pose a major threat to any user that browses a maliciously crafted page using Internet Explorer and has Google Chrome installed alongside. Using a vulnerability in the...
MFSA 2009-22 Firefox allows Refresh header to redirect to javascript: URIs MFSA 2009-21 POST data sent to wrong site when saving web page with embedded frame MFSA 2009-20 Malicious search plugins can inject code into arbitrary sites MFSA 2009-19 Same-origin violations in XMLHttpRequest and XPCNativeWrapper.toString MFSA 2009-18 XSS hazard using third-party stylesheets...
Twitter has posted an entry on it's xss worm issues this weekend. "On a weekend normally reserved for bunnies, a worm took center stage. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program sometimes introduced by folks with malicious intent to do some harm to a network. Please note that no passwords, phone...
UPDATE: F-Secure has posted more detailed information. "Some 24 hours after a worm spread advertising on Twitter, the popular social networking website, a second worm emerged on Sunday. Both worms appear to be created by Mikeyy Mooney, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn, New York. The first worm emerged on Saturday when Twitter profiles...
"This article provides a simple positive model for preventing XSS using output escaping/encoding properly. While there are a huge number of XSS attack vectors, following a few simple rules can completely defend against this serious attack. These rules apply to all the different varieties of XSS. Both reflected and stored XSS can...
In 2006 I gave a talk on hacking RSS feeds, and feed readers. I stumbled upon the video for blackhat 2006 by accident the other day and thought it was worth posting. Video: http://media.blackhat.com/bh-usa-06/video/2006_BlackHat_Vegas-V36-Auger_and_Sima-0day_subscriptions.mp4 Slides: http://www.cgisecurity.com/papers/RSS-Security.ppt Paper: http://www.cgisecurity.com/papers/HackingFeeds.pdf
"I’ve developed a new XSS scanner tool that’s written in Javascript called XSS Rays for Microsoft. They have given me permission to release the tool as open source which is awesome because it can be used for other open source applications. I recommend you use it as part of the web development...
Bryan Sullivan over at Microsoft has published a lengthy article on the advantages of URL writing to prevent certain types of attacks. "Tim Berners-Lee once famously wrote that "cool URIs don't change." His opinion was that broken hyperlinks erode user confidence in an application and that URIs should be designed in such...
"Yesterday, at the Blackhat DC security conference, I spoke about the dangers of persistent web browser storage. Part of the talk focused on how emerging web browser storage solutions such as Gears (formerly Google Gears) and the Database Storage functionality included in the emerging HTML 5 specification, could be attacked on sites...
"A Romanian hacker site said on Wednesday it was able to breach the website of Helsinki-based security firm F-Secure just as it had gained access to the sites of two other security companies earlier in the week. F-Secure is "vulnerable to SQL Injection plus Cross Site Scripting," an entry on the HackersBlog...
Fixed in Firefox 3.0.6 MFSA 2009-06 Directives to not cache pages ignored MFSA 2009-05 XMLHttpRequest allows reading HTTPOnly cookies MFSA 2009-04 Chrome privilege escalation via local .desktop files MFSA 2009-03 Local file stealing with SessionStore MFSA 2009-02 XSS using a chrome XBL method and window.eval MFSA 2009-01 Crashes with evidence of memory...
I've been involved in the security community for over 10 years and have worked for small, medium, and large companies. I have also worked in Quality Assurance and base my comments here on my experiences being a QA tester, and speaking with them as an outsider. I've seen advice in articles, and...
"Bryan here. The security community has been buzzing since SANS and MITRE’s joint announcement earlier this month of their list of the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. Now, I don’t want to get into a debate in this blog about whether this new list will become the new de facto standard...
anantasec posted a scanner comparison to the web security mailing list today. "In the past weeks, I've performed an evaluation/comparison of three popular web vulnerability scanners.This evaluation was ordered by a penetration testing company that will remain anonymous. The vendors were not contacted during or after the evaluation. The applications (web scanners)...
MFSA 2008-60 - Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.5/1.8.1.19) MFSA 2008-61 Information stealing via loadBindingDocument MFSA 2008-64 XMLHttpRequest 302 response disclosure MFSA 2008-65 Cross-domain data theft via script redirect error message| MFSA 2008-66 Errors parsing URLs with leading whitespace and control characters MFSA 2008-67 Escaped null characters ignored by CSS parser...
Jeremiah Grossman has posted an entry discussing the various security reports and how they are labeling web application security as a primary concern. "It’s unanimous. Web application security is the #1 avenue of attack according to basically every industry data security report available (IBM, Websense, Sophos, MessageLabs, Cisco, APWG, MITRE, Symantec, Trend...
"A glaring vulnerability on the American Express website has unnecessarily put visitors at risk for more than two weeks and violates industry regulations governing credit card companies, a security researcher says. Among other things, the cross-site scripting (XSS) error on americanexpress.com allows attackers to steal users' authentication cookies, which are used to...
"Opera pushed out an update to its popular web browser on Tuesday that fixes vulnerabilities it described as "extremely severe". The update fixes seven security bugs, some of which were previously known. Version 9.63 of the browser addresses separate code injection risks stemming from flaws in HTML parsing and text inputing, respectively....
"CAT.NET - Community Technology Preview CAT.NET is a managed code static analysis tool for finding security vulnerabilities. It's exactly the same tool we use internally to scan all of our Line of Business (LOB) applications; it runs as a Visual Studio plug-in or as a stand-alone application. It was engineered by this...
There is a write up at Coding Insecurity on filtering non ascii characters to prevent XSS attacks. "I have been working on a medium-sized development project lately and, came across a peculiar phenomenon where I could execute scripts on a page without the use of less-than (<) or greater-than (>) symbols. Instead...
Rafel Ivgi has published an extensive list of IE8 XSS filter evasions. "Aspect9 has discovered several vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2. This new version of Microsoft's famous browser includes new security improvements such as a Cross Site Scripting(XSS) filter. This version also includes a new object that safely...
An anonymous user writes "In his previous blog post, Sacha provided an updated list of the asp.net control html encoding information. He now integrated the content into FXCop to help quickly identify spots in asp.net binaries that should be reviewed for XSS issues." Read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/archive/2008/09/18/fxcop-htmlspotter-spotting-asp-net-xss-using-fxcop-and-html-encoding-document.aspx
Microsoft has posted an article on what real world XSS vulnerable code looks like in ASP.NET applications. Handy if you develop asp.net or audit it for issues. "From couple of weeks we have been seeing some XSS vulnerabilities in asp.net code. Today I wanted to show you guys some real world examples...
The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) is pleased to announce the WASC Web Application Security Statistics Project 2007. This initiative is a collaborative industry wide effort to pool together sanitized website vulnerability data and to gain a better understanding about the web application vulnerability landscape. We ascertain which classes of attacks are...
"Last time we saw how to fix a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. This time we look at how we can detect cross site scripting vulnerabilities using automated tools. Being the most common vulnerability found in web applications, it is very important to detect and mitigate XSS vulnerabilities early in development cycle....
Bryan Sullivan from Microsoft has posted an article on SDL use to secure web applications. "The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team recently released details of the SDL process that has been so successful in helping to make Microsoft products more secure. You can find these documents at microsoft.com/sdl. As you read through...
Sacha Faust has just published a grid mapping which asp.net controls automatically perform html entity output encoding when used. Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/archive/2008/09/02/which-asp-net-controls-automatically-encodes.aspx Grid: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/attachment/8918996.ashx
Generally, browsers stop cross-site communication by following the "same-origin policy". This rule is pretty simple: if your site has a different origin - protocol, domain, and port don't all match - you aren't allowed to access information from or send requests to the other site. Without this simple rule, there would be...
Richard Brain has published a whitepaper on bypassing .NET XSS protection. "The Microsoft .NET framework comes with a request validation feature, configurable by the ValidateRequest [1] setting. ValidateRequest has been a feature of ASP.NET since version 1.1. This feature consists of a series of filters, designed to prevent classic web input validation...
While attending defcon I got to check out a talk on a new web application security scanner called Grendel scanner. For those of you who don't know I used to work at spi dynamics on the webinspect product (now part of HP) and I got to say it is one of the...
"All web applications allow some form of rich data, but that rich data has become a key part of Web 2.0. Data is "rich" if it allows markup, special characters, images, formatting, and other complex syntax. This richness allows users create new and innovative content and services. Unfortunately, richness affords attackers an...
Microsoft has posted a very extensive article outling the security improvements to IE8. Improvements have been made to the following area's. - Cross-Site-Scripting Defenses - Safer Mashups (HTML and JSON Sanitization) - MIME-Handling Changes (Restrict Upsniff and Sniffing Opt-Out) - Add-on Security - Protected Mode - Application Protocol Prompt - File Upload...
"We recently researched an interesting DOM-based XSS vulnerability in Adobe Flex 3 applications that exploits a scenario in which two frames (parent & son) interact with each other, without properly validating their execution environment. In our research, we have seen that in some cases, it is possible to manipulate JavaScript code flow,...
"Yes Cross Site Scripting (XSS) errors are all over the place. And YES they can affect very prominent web sites. The discussion forum area on Barackobama.com is allegedly the victim of a XSS exploit that redirected comments from Obama's site to....HillaryClinton.com. A hacker going by the alias of 'Mox' has claimed responsibility...
"When users visit a website like Wired.com, the DNS system maps the domain name into an IP address such as 72.246.49.48. But if a particular site does not exist, the DNS server tells the browser that there's no such listing and a simple error message should be displayed. But starting in August...
"Last week's massive IFRAME injection attack is slowly turning into a what looks like a large scale web application vulnerabilities audit of high profile sites. Following the timely news coverage, Symantec's rating for the attack as medium risk, StopBadware commenting on XP Antivirus 2008, and US-CERT issuing a warning about the incident,...
"The Scrapkut worm uses active code injection to spread between victims and their friends on Orkut. The malicious code appears on a victim’s scrapbook, containing a link to a supposed YouTube video. People who click on the link are redirected to an external site hosting malware that's disguised as a Flash upgrade....
"An extremely convincing phishing attack is using a cross-site scripting vulnerability on an Italian Bank's own website to attempt to steal customers' bank account details. Fraudsters are currently sending phishing mails which use a specially-crafted URL to inject a modified login form onto the bank's login page. The vulnerable page is served...
Rich Cannings has published an advisory on the Web Security Mailing List describing a flaw on common flash authoring tools allowing for XSS. From his advisory "THE PROBLEM Many web authoring tools that automatically generate SWFs insert identical and vulnerable ActionScript into all saved SWFs or necessary controller SWFs (think of tools...
According to ISC orkut has been striken with a persistant XSS worm via the user profiles. Will be updating this as new information breaks so stay tuned! So far no news at the orkut blog UPDATE A few news articles have started to pop up regarding this. "Google's Orkut social networking site...
"One of the biggest, constant problems we've seen our enterprise customers deal with and we here at Microsoft have to also contend with is that of the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) bug. It's very common and unfortunately, still an issue we have to deal with in many web applications. Internally, the ACE...
"Making it even easier to create secure applications out of the box is always a pleasure and with Rails 2.0 we’re doing it from a number of fronts. Most importantly, we now ship we a built-in mechanism for dealing with CRSF attacks. By including a special token in all forms and Ajax...
A XSS vulnerability has been discovered in apache. "Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in mod_status.c in the mod_status module in Apache HTTP Server (httpd), when ExtendedStatus is enabled and a public server-status page is used, allows remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via unspecified vectors involving charsets with browsers that...
"The New Zealand Herald's website fell victim to a page spoofing stunt earlier today, by hackers wanting to publicise their upcoming Kiwicon security conference in November. In this case, the spoofing meant the hackers displayed a parody of a Herald article to users, rather than a real one, when surfers called up...
clpwn.com has found an XSS vulnerability in USAToday and has been having fun with it to *post* fake news stories. First a description of the group "Hardcore WEB HACKING and 0day browser security stuff from wannabe elite hackers TEAM CLPWN..." Now about the vuln "The underground hacker team CLPWN has exposed a...
"XSS have became a problem that most web developers still suffering from it tell now, simply because however you try hard to validate every user input it only takes a single line of code that prints out the user input without validation to render your whole application vulnerable to XSS attacks and...
Rosario Valotta writes in to tell us "I realized a PoC of what I define a XWW - Cross webmail worm, based on exploitation of XSS vulnerabilities. Detailed informations and a video can be found at: http://rosario.valotta.googlepages.com/home" Article Link: http://rosario.valotta.googlepages.com/home
"For years buffer overflow has been the favorite target of online attackers, but no more: Cross-site scripting is now the biggest culprit That's the scoop from Mitre Corp., which later this week will release its latest findings about the flaws behind publicly-disclosed vulnerabilities. The number two favorite flaw is SQL injection, says...
"Cross-site scripting (XSS) may be the poster child for what's wrong with Web security, but an updated vulnerability report from Mitre suggests that two lesser-known attack vectors are quietly growing as well. Mitre has quietly released the final version of its 2006 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report, which it previewed last...
"The last few years have seen a constant rise in vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS), HTTP response splitting, and cross-site request forgery (XSRF or CSRF). While the vectors and exploit of each of these vulnerability classes vary, they all have one common thread. Each of these vulnerabilities exploits trust shared between a...
"The man responsible for unleashing what is believed to be the first self-propagating cross-site scripting worm has pleaded guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court to charges stemming from his most infamous hacking. Samy Kamkar, who was 19 when he unleashed the attack on MySpace.com in October 2005, was sentenced to three years...
An XSS issue in adobe acrobat allows you to xss a user against any website hosting a PDF file. UPDATE: Download Acrobat 8 it address this issue to protect yourself. If you host PDF files on a site it has been suggested that you associate the PDF mimetype on your web server...
"For defence in depth, developers may wish to use the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library to encode output. This library differs from most encoding libraries in that it uses the "principle of inclusions" technique to provide protection against XSS attacks. This approach works by first defining a valid or allowable set of...
For various reasons I'm going to report this as neutral as possible. Apparently F5 and Acunetix both web security vendors were found to have XSS holes in their website according to RSnake's forum. To be honest with you yeah it is embarrassing but s!@# happens however that isn't why I'm posting this...
Rsnake has an interesting blog entry (yes it's a few days old, I don't read it daily, so whatever) regarding utilizing XSS to steal auto form fill values. "Some (not all) automated input automation tools do so blindly. That is, they don't ask for user input when they input data. In fact...
I started researching RSS and Atom feed vulns last September but got distracted for 6 months or so with work/life. I've written a basic paper discussing the issues relating to Cross Site Scripting and web based feeds. I cover the risks associated with the following types of readers: * Web Based Readers...
"The scam works quite convincingly, by tricking users into accessing a URL hosted on the genuine PayPal web site. The URL uses SSL to encrypt information transmitted to and from the site, and a valid 256-bit SSL certificate is presented to confirm that the site does indeed belong to PayPal; however, some...
"A JavaScript worm that takes advantage of an unpatched vulnerability in Yahoo!'s webmail service has been discovered on the net. The JS-Yamanner worm spreads when a Windows user accesses Yahoo! Mail to open an email sent by the worm. The attack works because of a vulnerability in Yahoo! Mail that enables scripts...
A posting to the Full Disclosure mailing list claims an unpatched Cross Site Scripting vulnerability in Yahoo!'s mail with example script code. Quoting the author "i didnt contact yahoo, because i contacted them previously regarding a similar vulnerability, and yes they fixed it "silently" without even sending me a thank you email,...
libox.net has released a cross site scripting paper which provides examples of bad php code, and also talks a little bit about automating an attack. Additional papers on XSS can be found in our Cross Site Scripting section. "Cross site scripting (XSS) flaws are a relatively common issue in web application security,...
Currently small informational tidbits about Cross Site Scripting holes exist but none really explain them to an average person or administrator. This FAQ was written to provide a better understanding of this emerging threat, and to give guidance on detection and prevention. This article also covers practicle examples of cookie theft, and...
