XSS Vulnerabilities and Blackhat SEO
Image Courtesy : https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/04/what-is-an-xss-vulnerability.html
As we know there are number of technique which blackhat SEO uses to create problem with PCs, web applications, websites and other by injecting harmful codes or content. Blackhat SEO uses such technique to rank high related sites and to affect ranking of other leading sites. XSS vulnerability is one among those ways which blackhat SEO uses. XSS becomes the widely spread vulnerability which is able to create problem with web applications. This vulnerability allow attackers to execute malicious script (commonly known as malicious payload) into legit websites or application. XSS is also known to be one of the most rampant vulnerability of web application. It occurs because of unencoded or unvalidated user input between the output which application generates.
An attacker can not target directly by leveraging XSS vulnerability. Instead he/she uses vulnerability that of the website or web application. The vulnerability is being used as vehicle by the attacker to deliver malicious script to targeted browser or web application.
The XSS vulnerability usually takes advantage of ActiveX, Flash, VBScript, the highly abused one is JavaScript, because it is the fundamental of large number of browsing experience.
How XSS Vulnerability Works
To run harmful JavaScript code in targeted user’s browser, a cyber crook firstly find the way to inject payload into web page that user tries to visit. Usually the crooks uses social engineering technique to send victim on vulnerable page.
To perform XSS attack on targeted site, it need to include user input directly in the page. The crooks then tries to pierce string in the web page to be treated as code for victim’s browsers.
For displaying the most recent comment on a web page the following server side pseudo code is being used.
print “<html>”
print “<h1>Most recent comment</h1>”
print database.latestComment
print “</html>”
Is XSS Vulnerability is harmful for the User?
As discussed above, this vulnerability is used by the spammers to put critical affect on websites and web applications. If cyber crooks takes advantage of XSS vulnerability on web pages to run arbitrary JavaScript in browser, the security get compromised.
This vulnrability carries forward with the help of different malwares like Trojan, browser hijacker, Adware etc. These threat individually known to put critical affect on PCs and running application. As, it is required to sort out XSS vulnerability in the same manner, these threats are required to remove immediately. For more information on such threat and there removal you can visit : http://www.ahlaup.com/
Resource : http://www.acunetix.com/websitesecurity/cross-site-scripting/