Clickjacking | How Does Clickjacking Work?

A new vulnerability that puts users of every major web browser at risk - clickjacking - has been discovered by security researchers.

We're not sure, again, because of the paucity of information. But Michal Zalewski, a renowned security researcher who now works for Google, offered up one example.

"A malicious page in domain A may create an IFRAME pointing to an application in domain B, to which the user is currently authenticated with cookies," Zalewski said. "The top-level page may then cover portions of the IFRAME with other visual elements to seamlessly hide everything but a single UI button in domain B, such as 'delete all items,' 'click to add Bob as a friend,' etc. It may then provide [its] own, misleading UI that implies that the button serves a different purpose and is a part of site A, inviting the user to click it."

In other words, the hacker would dupe users into visiting a malicious page - through the usual methods - but then hide the nasty bits under what appears to be the real-deal content from a legitimate site.

How Bad is Clickjacking?

Another good question, but again, the answer's a little dodgy. "Attackers can do quite a lot," Grossman said. "Some things that could be pretty spooky."

Not everyone's convinced this is a big deal, however. "The difficult thing is finding out what to do with this," said Dave Aitel, chief technology officer of Immunity.

In that same vein, there have been few sirens sounded by security teams or organiSations. The United State Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is under the Department of Homeland Security umbrella, acknowledged the reports, but had no new information, and no advice except its standing recommendations for securing a browser.

What Can I do to Keep Clickjackers Back?

Not much at the moment. Of the few concrete pieces of advice that have surfaced, one requires giving up the internet as you know it, while the other will put a serious crimp in your browsing.

The first way to protect yourself from clickjacking is to switch to Lynx, an open-source text-only browser that harks back to the web's Dark Ages: 1992. Although Lynx is better known in the Unix/Linux world, there are versions for Mac OS X and Windows.

Clickjacking won't work if you're using Lynx simply because there's no graphic content that an attacker can grab from it to pull over his own malicious code. But text-only browsing is, well, so last century...

Hansen, however, said that the combination of Firefox and NoScript, an extension that blocks JavaScript, Flash and Java content, would keep you safe from "a very good chunk of the issues, 99.99 percent at this point".

NoScript has its drawbacks, though: Unless a user manually enables the switch-off-by-default content, many sites will either be unusable or prohibitively limited.

Page 1 | Clickjacking - How Safe is Your Computer?

Page 3 | When Will Clickjacking Problems be Patched?

*This information originally appeared on PC Advisor's Website.