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My All-Time Favorite Demonstration of a Cross-Site Scripting Attack

Ben Halpern on May 04, 2017

This is a glorious story from a few years ago. If you haven't read about it before, I'm about to tell you. If you already know about this, I sugges...
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Nick Shvelidze

The heart is the most important part of this. The XSS attack wouldn't work without it. I think it had to do with the way TweetDeck escaped HTML.

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Giuseppe Frau

literally a heart attack

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Sven Luijten

You're right, the heart emoji was integral to the attack. If I recall correctly, a new escaping mechanism for how emoji were handled was deployed and caused the XSS vulnerability.

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Tiago Marques • Edited

< script >alert('Hello XSS')</ script >

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Gergő Móricz

The hearth emoji caused the HTML filter to break.

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chuck

How many angry emails do you think the tweet deck creators got that day? hmmmm

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─ 502 l4p1n ─►

I think they got many upon many of them ^^

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Robert Morschel

Awesome! 😂

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Andrew Tanner 🇪🇺

I never knew about this, ha! Retweets were made for XSS ;)

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Ben Halpern

Born for each other.

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James Hood

Love it. Great post!

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Ben Halpern

Thanks!

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jD91mZM2

Well, without jQuery it wouldn't have been so easy to fit it in a tweet. But yeah, this is pretty cool :>

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Stefan Petrushevski

you can still call and execute an external script...