Cross-Site Scripting

 Cross-Site Scripting 

In January of 2019, an XSS vulnerability was discovered in the Steam Chat client operated by Valve, a computer gaming company with more than 90 million active users, any number of whom could have been attacked until the bug was disclosed. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted websites. It’s conceptually like an SQL injection — where malicious code is entered into a form to gain access to the site’s database — except that in the case of XSS, the malicious code is designed to execute within the browser of another visitor to the site, allowing the attacker to steal user cookies, read session IDs, alter the contents of a website or redirect a user to a malicious site.

What you need to know: XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are widespread and occur anywhere a web application generates input from a user without validating or encoding it. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, automatically executing on the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, it can access cookies, session tokens or other sensitive information retained by the browser. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page



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