big bad XSS bugs in 80% of web sites

[jdh]

Yahoo! fixes bug that gave free rein to user accounts
All hail the power of the XSS error!
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Friday 15th June 2007 20:33 GMT

"It's incredibly powerful because it allows the attackers to to do anything they want to any website that's vulnerable," says Robert Hansen, a researcher specializing in web-based security who runs the ha.ckers.org blog. "It's not well understood in the development community." Hansen estimates about 80 percent of sites contain one or more XSS flaws.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/15/yahoo_xss_error/

As far as I can tell, firewalls provide zero protection against such attacks, and anti-spy and anti-virus only provide partial protection against such attacks. Off-hand, I don't know anything besides the NoScript extension of Firefox that protects against this.

DH

[jdh]

anti-spy and anti-virus only provide partial protection against such attacks.

According to what I understand, anti-spy and anti-virus work by checking, with heuristics and definitions/signatures, what programs write to disk or write to the Windows registry.

However, scripts running in a browser don't need to touch the disk or touch the registry to do their dirty work (such as capturing key strokes or uploading files to the web).

:eek: