xss

An exploit selling for $700 may put millions of Yahoo Mail users at risk of having their e-mail account hijacked and their browsers redirected to malicious sites.

Marketed by an allegedly Egyptian hacker on a cybercrime forum, the exploit targets a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Yahoo.com that allows attackers to steal and replace tracking cookies, as well as read and send e-mail from a victim's account. Typically, an attacker will encode a malicious link in e-mails; the script is executed when the unsuspecting recipient clicks on the link, allowing access to the cookies and other sensitive information. … Read more

A new threat is looming for browsers and it's not related to JavaScript.

Security researcher Mario Heiderich reported to the maker of Firefox last year that he had found an unusual vulnerability in the browser and two other Mozilla products that run on the Gecko engine, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Based in the relatively new technology that allows for animated complex vector graphics in the browser, called SVG animation, the vulnerability allowed for a malware writer to detect key strokes even when JavaScript was disabled.

Basically, he found a way to turn innocuous Web pages into keyloggers. Mozilla patched the … Read more

Within days of Facebook rolling out new security features designed to block spam, several new social-engineering attacks were spreading that somehow managed to get by the company's antispam defenses.

The spammers have modified their handiwork so it will get past Facebook's scam detection system, company spokesman Fred Wolens told CNET today.

"There are new methods they've picked up after we put out the protections on Thursday," he said. "It's an arms race. We put out new protections and they come up with new campaigns...When we announced the new security features, they were … Read more

Updated 5:15 p.m. PDT with McAfee saying most of the vulnerabilities have been fixed.

Security vulnerabilities on McAfee sites, including one designed to scan customers' sites for flaws, exposed certain customer accounts and could have been used for phishing attacks in which malware disguised as McAfee software could be distributed, security experts say.

McAfee said late on Tuesday that most of the vulnerabilities were fixed, except for one part of the Web site that was taken offline to be fixed.

The McAfee sites were found to be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and cross-site request forgery attacks … Read more

Google released a new version of its Chrome browser Thursday to fix a high-severity security problem.

The problem affects Google's mainstream stable version of Chrome and is fixed in the new version 1.0.154.59 (download). Google has built Chrome so it updates itself automatically with no user intervention, though the software must be restarted for the new version to run.

The security problem, reported April 8 by Roi Saltzman of the IBM Rational Application Security Research Group, allowed cross-site scripting attacks. Such methods can make a Web browser process unauthorized code such as JavaScript, enabling a variety … Read more

Don't count Internet Explorer out just yet.

On Wednesday, Microsoft released the second public beta for Internet Explorer 8. If anything, this release brings IE up to par with alternative browsers such as Opera, Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox in terms of security and features. It also pushes Microsoft a little ahead of the competition.

The user interface hasn't changed much since Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, except to add a Security pull-down menu between Page and Tools on the main toolbar. In addition to blocking phishing sites, IE 8 now highlights the main domain of … Read more

Google released a free tool Tuesday that should help Web developers find and fix cross-site vulnerabilities.

The tool, RatProxy, is described by Google as "a semi-automated, largely passive Web application security audit tool, optimized for an accurate and sensitive detection, and automatic annotation, of potential problems and security-relevant design patterns based on the observation of existing, user-initiated traffic in complex Web 2.0 environments."

The tool is versatile, detecting and ranking a broad class of vulnerabilities. Included are script injections, cross-site trust attacks, content-serving vulnerabilities, cross-site request forgeries (XSRF), and cross-site scripting (XSS).

RatProxy runs on Linux, FreeBSD, … Read more

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced new security features within the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. The features are designed to combat the rising tide of drive-by downloads and malicious scripts contained within carefully crafted links embedded in e-mail and Web pages. Most of the new features require systems to be running Windows Vista SP1 or Windows XP SP3.

Perhaps the most anticipated addition is Internet Explorer's new antimalware protection. Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 both recently added antimalware protection. Safari has so far not announced plans for similar protection. Using mostly its own antimalware technology, Microsoft … Read more

Security researcher Bill Rios reported Monday that a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against Google Spreadsheet could have exposed all of Google's services. XSS can occur whenever a legitimate site accepts input from the user but does not filter that input properly and could allow the injection of potentially malicious instructions. In this case, however, once an attacker gained access to any xxxx.google.com site, they would have access to other Google services, such as Gmail, Docs, and Code.

In an e-mail to CNET News.com, a Google representative confirmed that the flaw as described by Rios has been … Read more