Dan Moniz & HD Moore: Six Degrees of XSSploitation

Published: June 4, 2006, 11:10 p.m.

b'Social networking sites such as MySpace have recently been the target of XSS attacks, most notably the "samy is my hero" incident in late 2005. XSS affects a wide variety of sites and back end web technologies, but there are perhaps no more interesting targets than massively popular sites with viral user acquisition growth curves, which allow for exponential XSS worm propagation, as seen in samy\'s hack. Combine the power of reaching a wide and ever-widening audience with browser exploits (based on the most common browsers with such a broad "normal person" user base) that can affect more than just the browser as we saw with WMF, a insertion and infection method based on transparent XSS, and payloads which can themselves round-trip the exploit code back into the same or other vulnerable sites, and you have a self-healing distributed worm propagation platform with extremely accelerated infection vectors.\\n\\t\\n\\tWe investigate the possibilities using MySpace and other popular sites as case studies, along with the potential posed by both WMF and The Metasploit Project\'s recently-released browser fuzzing tool, Hamachi, to own a site with self-replicating XSS containing a malicious browser-exploiting payload which itself will modify the browser to auto-exploit other sites, all transparent to the user. On top of this one could layer any additional functionality, some loud, some quiet, such as DDoS bots, keyloggers, other viral payloads, and more.\\n\\t\\n\\tDan Moniz is a independent security consultant, and is also a member of The Shmoo Group, a world-recognized affiliation of information security professionals. Mr. Moniz has spoken at a number of conferences, including Defcon, ShmooCon, and The Intelligence Summit, in addition to private audiences at Fortune 50 companies and universities. In 2003 he testified in front of California State Senate in a hearing on the issues of RFID technology, privacy, and state legislation. In the past, he has held positions with a variety of high tech companies and organizations, including Alexa Internet (an Amazon.com company), Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cloudmark, OpenCola, and Viasec.\\n\\t\\n\\tHD Moore is Director of Security Research at BreakingPoint Systems where he focuses on the security testing features of the BreakingPoint product line. Prior to joining BreakingPoint, HD co-founded Digital Defense, a managed security services firm, where he developed the vulnerability assessment platform and lead the security research team. HD is the founder of the Metasploit Project and one of the core developers of the\\n\\t\\n\\tMetasploit Framework, the leading open-source exploit development platform. In his spare time, HD searches for new vulnerabilities, develops security tools, and contributes to open-source security projects."'