In the Web 2.0 services, hackers have found a "fundamental vulnerability"
This year there were many interesting reports and presentations at the Black Hat hacker conference. For example, one of the reports was devoted to the interception of personal data that is transmitted over a wireless WiFi network. Hacking is based on reading cookies, so any modern web services, including Gmail and Yahoo Mail, are vulnerable to this vulnerability.
Rob Graham, executive director of the hacker company Errata Security personally demonstrated how the sniffer works. It functions as follows: analyzing traffic, the program calculates the "cookies" that are used to authorize sessions. By copying them to his computer, the attacker gets the opportunity to go to one or another website on behalf of the victim.
Copying cookies is, in fact, equivalent to copying someone else's identity, since modern Web 2.0 services use user authentication only after they log in to the site. “This is a fundamental vulnerability in Web 2.0 services,” says Rob Graham.
Of course, hacking into someone else's mailbox, the hacker cannot find out the password from this mailbox, but he gets access to the entire archive of letters, personal bookmarks, calendar and other private data. Surely, among this information, you can find passwords to other services, and other useful information to the hacker.
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Web services that authorize via cookies generate a unique numeric identifier for each user. So, in some cases, this ID remains unchanged for an infinite time, just like cookies have an unlimited statute of limitations. This means that hackers can access accounts for many years, even if the user has repeatedly changed the password.
By stealing cookies, a hacker can hack an account even if the user is authenticated using a secure SSL protocol. You can guarantee the security of the user only if the entire communication session is completely protected by this protocol, so the sniffer cannot detect cookies in an encrypted stream of information. Some web services allow this.
Rob Graham, executive director of the hacker company Errata Security personally demonstrated how the sniffer works. It functions as follows: analyzing traffic, the program calculates the "cookies" that are used to authorize sessions. By copying them to his computer, the attacker gets the opportunity to go to one or another website on behalf of the victim.
Copying cookies is, in fact, equivalent to copying someone else's identity, since modern Web 2.0 services use user authentication only after they log in to the site. “This is a fundamental vulnerability in Web 2.0 services,” says Rob Graham.
Of course, hacking into someone else's mailbox, the hacker cannot find out the password from this mailbox, but he gets access to the entire archive of letters, personal bookmarks, calendar and other private data. Surely, among this information, you can find passwords to other services, and other useful information to the hacker.
')
Web services that authorize via cookies generate a unique numeric identifier for each user. So, in some cases, this ID remains unchanged for an infinite time, just like cookies have an unlimited statute of limitations. This means that hackers can access accounts for many years, even if the user has repeatedly changed the password.
By stealing cookies, a hacker can hack an account even if the user is authenticated using a secure SSL protocol. You can guarantee the security of the user only if the entire communication session is completely protected by this protocol, so the sniffer cannot detect cookies in an encrypted stream of information. Some web services allow this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/12894/
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