PayPal is vulnerable, XSS

(There is another post in Spanish | Puedes acceder a la versión de post en Español aqui)
Today, here we are with the next post about a kind of hacking.

A few months ago (about December'11) two Indian hackers were able to launch an attack using the URL from the PayPal site.
That not means anything about the server breaking-into, this is not correct. But that could mean a "Man in the middle" attack (MITMA).

Why wanna do with a MITM attack?
Easy to know, to review and steal your sensitive information like user accounts and passwords, bank accounts...




What's a "man in the middle attack"??


We will supose: I want to launch a MITM between Google and a friend's pc. I'll need a software to "cheat" my friend's pc (i.e. Metasploit). When he writes google.com he won't access to google,he'll access to my pc camouflaged as Google web site and I will be connected to the real Google server.

In the image (right), "Web Server" could be Google in our example and the victim PC is our friend's PC.

In the image (left), the victim is "authorized user". The attacker say to the access point (AP) that he is the authorized user and the attacker say to user that he is the AP.



By the way, the attacker will be in the middle of the data traffic.

Thus, the authorized one will think that he is directly connected to the corporate LAN but the attacker will be seeing all his data transmission.







Then, what's XSS - (Cross Site Scripting)???


XSS is a kind of vulnerability directly related with websites and/or web applications that allows an attacker to send data bypassing server validations. This vulnerability could cause a few kinds of attacks: persistent, non-persistent...

In summary (if your an expert hacker you will feel stomach ache with this summary and definitions, it's just for let a simple definition for non-experts):

- If the hacker "cheat" the remote user and use its data to access the server data, it's non-persistent XSS attack
- If the hacker "cheat" the server admin user and use its data to access the client data, it persistent XSS attack

For the second type, this is a graphical explanation:


If you wanna get more advanced definitions about XSS, click here.
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We are legion.
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