Disclosure of Major New Web 'Clickjacking' Threat Gets Deferred

Via DarkReading -

Details of a new major Web attack that could potentially affect millions of users won’t see the light of day next week as planned after the researchers who discovered it agreed to hold off on disclosing their find until Adobe comes up with a patch for its product.

Renowned Web security researchers Robert "RSnake" Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman late yesterday pulled their presentation "New 0-Day Browser Exploits: Clickjacking - yea, this is bad" from the upcoming OWASP USA security conference in New York, after Adobe requested that the researchers give them time to come up with a patch for one of its applications before they release their proof-of-concept code.

Hansen and Grossman just days ago found that a vulnerability that can be used for so-called “clickjacking” attacks wasn’t in Adobe’s application, but in various browsers, including Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s, and affects Adobe's application. It can even evade browser security features. While they can’t give details of the specific vulnerabilities at this time, they say this new clickjacking attack -- where a bad guy lures a victim to click onto a link -- could leverage other Web attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and cross-site request forgery (CSRF), to attack a wider range of users.

“It surprised us that Adobe took ownership over an attack technique that we considered to be the responsibility of the browser vendors,” says Grossman, who also blogged on the decision to drop the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) talk. “They want to protect their users as best they can no matter what. So when that happened, we had to put the disclosure brakes on.”

OWASP member and researcher Joshua Perrymon says the newly discovered attack lets the bad guy take control of the victim’s audio, microphone, and Webcam and interact with the desktop. Grossman and Hansen, however, wouldn’t comment on those details.

“It lets them own any PC remotely that’s running Flash/IE browser, just by having a user visit a site with the malicious .swf,” says Perrymon, who has done some research on malicious .swf files in the past.

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Also check out Rsnake's blog (Snake Bytes) on Darkreading for more information....