Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly discovered vulnerabilities, data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to your email inbox.
MySpace Under Siege
A weekend phishing attack and more XSS zero-day proof-of-concept code are testing the social networking site's security mettle
Kelly Jackson Higgins, Editor-in-Chief, Dark Reading
October 30, 2006
2 Min Read
More trouble in MySpace: The social networking site is now under the threat of two new zero-day bugs that have been released in the form of proof-of-concept code. The new bugs come after a weekend during which MySpace shut down a major phishing attack that had reportedly spread to around 3,000 pages on the site.
Two hackers have released POC code for XSS fragmentation exploits, demonstrating that MySpace's patch last week for a previously released XSS fragmentation vulnerability didn't truly fix the problem. (See MySpace Hacker: Fix Is Flawed and Zero Day Flaw Found in MySpace.)
The phishing attack, meanwhile, launched from a profile page using a specially-crafted HTML that hid the real MySpace page content and instead showed the nefarious one, according to NetCraft, which says it has reported the attack to MySpace. The spoofed login page tried to lure a user into providing his or her username and password, and then would send it to a remote server in France.
Phishing isn't all MySpace has had to worry about lately. The hacker who first introduced an XSS fragmentation POC bug, kuza55, has released yet another one showing how MySpace's patch for the first one didn't quite cut it. And the second researcher has released yet another POC for the same type of vulnerability that takes only a few seconds to deploy.
MySpace's incomplete XSS fragmentation patch reflects a common problem among Websites, security experts say: Developers need to understand not only their HTML browsers but also XSS nuances, or they can get owned by some variant of XSS.
"It seemed like MySpace could still be vulnerable to XSS fragmentation attacks, and surprise, surprise, they are," says kuza55.
Kuza55 says the reason MySpace's didn't go far enough was because there are plenty more XSS attack vectors than the one he used, and his new one is nearly identical, save for some punctuation. He changed the single quotes to grave accents, which only works in IE and Netscape 8.1.
MySpace had not yet responded to press inquiries when this story was posted.
— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading
You May Also Like
More Insights
