Nasty Javascript attack possibilities
There were demonstrations of some nasty javascript attacks at Black Hat as well (as if the wireless driver issues wasn’t a big enough problem…) Javascript is a powerful language and can be used for many things, but in these demonstrations, it was used to track recently visited sites (by the browser victim) and identify the IP address of the victim on the internal LAN AND to alter firewall settings. From the way I read the article at the Security Fix – this is changing HARDWARE firewall settings.
I don’t know details as of yet, but have to wonder if uPnP would be involved with being able to change the firewall settings. I don’t know quite how else it could easily be done to alter a hardware firewalls configuration without lucking out and the target pc being the same pc that’s used to 1)administer the firewall or 2)save the login/password…. I do understand that uPnP enabled firewalls are susceptible to quite a number of possible attacks once the attacker is “in the internal network”.
More reasons to filter/proxy traffic at the firewall to begin with?
Update –8/3/06 4PM edt–
Betanews has some posibilities on these javascript exploits being aimed at rss readers. The idea here being that the baddies could either have a feed that they insert javascript into, OR more likely insert javascript into the comments on posts on a legit site. Many sites provide rss feeds for the comments on posts. The bottom line on this is that software that pulls data from untrusted sources needs to be cautious about verifying the data. (Or for rss readers to disable advanced features like javascript?)