Thursday, December 21, 2006
Hey people never create user pages in Myspace or any othersites like geocities,tripods etc with Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox browser makes it easy for cybercriminals to steal user information on Web sites .
The attack was used in a MySpace phishing attack reported in late October. In that attack, users registered a MySpace account named login_home_index_html and used it to host a fake log-in page that exploited the flaw.
This page sent MySpace username and password information to another Web site, and MySpace users who visited the page using Firefox could have easily had their information compromised, said Chapin.
The flaw arises because Firefox's Password Manager does not perform a thorough enough check when it is deciding whether to send password information, and then does not ensure that password information is being sent to the server that requested it, Chapin said. In the MySpace attack, for example, Firefox would check to see if the form was coming from the MySpace.com domain, but did not make sure that the password information was being sent back to a MySpace server.
Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) is also susceptible to these type of attacks because, like Firefox, it does not ensure that password information is being sent to the same server that requests it, Chapin said.
But IE is less likely to be tricked because it does a more thorough job in checking to see where the log-in form is coming from before it automatically submits password and user information.
The flaw lies in Firefox's Password Manager software, which can be tricked into sending password information to an attacker's Web site, said Robert Chapin, president of Chapin Information Services Inc. For this attack to work, attackers need to be able to create HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) forms on the Web site, something that is allowed on blogging and social networking sites.
The attack was used in a MySpace phishing attack reported in late October. In that attack, users registered a MySpace account named login_home_index_html and used it to host a fake log-in page that exploited the flaw.
This page sent MySpace username and password information to another Web site, and MySpace users who visited the page using Firefox could have easily had their information compromised, said Chapin.
The flaw arises because Firefox's Password Manager does not perform a thorough enough check when it is deciding whether to send password information, and then does not ensure that password information is being sent to the server that requested it, Chapin said. In the MySpace attack, for example, Firefox would check to see if the form was coming from the MySpace.com domain, but did not make sure that the password information was being sent back to a MySpace server.
Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) is also susceptible to these type of attacks because, like Firefox, it does not ensure that password information is being sent to the same server that requests it, Chapin said.
But IE is less likely to be tricked because it does a more thorough job in checking to see where the log-in form is coming from before it automatically submits password and user information.
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Blogumulus by Roy Tanck and Amanda Fazani
1 comments:
this is why i suggest never use password managers....passwords are meant to be a secret never believe Password Managers.