This weekend, presidential candidate, Barack Obama’s Web site was defaced via a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) exploit, effectively redirecting visitors to Hillary Clinton’s Web site. Whether or the Script Kiddie was from the Clinton camp, this should be a wake up call for Web designers to start holding XSS exploits with more priority.
As headlined by Netcraft, a firm that keeps the pulse on Web server configurations across the Web broke this headline: Hacker Redirects Barack Obama’s site to hillaryclinton.com.
Later, a fellow by the alias of “Mox,” posted the details on Obama Community Blogs stating how he/she manipulated the Web site. Before campaign staffers remove it, here is a copy of it:
By Mox from Liverpool, IL – Apr 20th, 2008 at 11:59 pm EDT First, let me explain why I put hacked in quotation marks. It is becaus e what I did was not hacking in the sense that I burrowed into some dusty served and changed the Obama site and stole all your credit card numbers. All I did was exploit some poorly written HTML code.So, you may be wondering, I never saw this hacking! Well, apparently someone videotaped it. http://youtube.com/watch?v=NKjomr1Afq0. You may also be wondering, how did you get Hillary’s site to appear where Obama’s should be. The answer to that is, through the magical world of Cross Site Scripting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting.
You might be wondering, how did you get xss to work here? First, go to your manage blog tab. Then go to Edit Settings. You see how you can put anything you want as a blog URL? Well, its fixed now, but before you could put in any characters you wanted. Including >, “, and [cut off]
