Re: myspace hack

[Stephen de Vries <stephen () corsaire com>]

On 14 Oct 2005, at 21:29, Reynolds, Jake wrote:

> I wouldn't consider this an XSS attack. Where in the attack did  
> information cross sites? This seems
> like it is an embedded XSS attack in that a malicious script was  
> entered into a profile in hopes that
> victims would view and execute it. However, nothing was sent across  
> sites via the script. The
> vulnerability was a lack of output validation in my opinion, which  
> is the same vulnerability that an
> XSS attack would exploit. I don't know how you would classify the  
> attack... Probably "self-replicating
> session riding". Yeah that has a nice FUD-factor to it.

The term "Cross Site Scripting" was a bit poorly chosen, and is more  
than a little misleading.  This attack _is_ a classic example of  
Cross Site Scripting since the user executed a script that did not  
come from the trusted site but came from an attacker instead.  Yes,  
technically it may have been embedded in the site, but it was created  
by the attacker.  I think you're following a very literal definition  
of what a XSS attack is, i.e. that the script actually has to come  
from another site - it doesn't; as long as it comes from an untrusted  
source, in this case the untrusted source was the initial attack  
embedded in the attacker's own profile.
So this is really an example of a persistent, or second order Cross  
Site Scripting attack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_site_scripting

Stephen


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Varenhorst [mailto:varenc () MIT EDU]
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 8:39 AM
> To: Akash
> Cc: webappsec () securityfocus com
> Subject: Re: myspace hack
>
> Oh wow I'm wrong, I'm apparently thinking of current myspace bots  
> which do
> as I described.  It looks this was in fact made possible by an XSS
> vulnerability.
> Sorry
>
> On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Chris Varenhorst wrote:
>
>
> > This isn't hacking at all. (at least not what I'd call it)
> > This is writing a script to go through myspace IDs (which happen  
> > to be
> > squential) issuing friend requests to every one of them.  To prevent
> > this, now myspace limits friend requests to a certain number per day.
> > Hope that covers it!
> >
> > -Chris
> >
> > On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Akash wrote:
> >
> >
> > > Does anyone has more technical details about how 1 million accounts
> > got hacked in about 24 hours.
> >
> > This is the supposed confession of the hacker
> > http://fast.info/myspace/
> >
> > I currently studying for CEH and just finished reading about XSS. So
> > this is of special interest.
> >
> > regards
> >
> > akash