If you’ve been following this series, we’ve highlighted some of the breaches of trusted sites that were, or could have been, used to attack visitors. There’s nothing like hitting a major media or financial site and using it to hack anyone who wanders by that day.

This week we’re breaking it down security style, thanks to multiple vulnerabilities at McAfee. McAfee suffered multiple XSS and CSRF vulnerabilities in different areas, including a simple CSRF in their vulnerability scanning service (ironic, eh?). If you don’t know, Cross Site Request Forgery allows an attacker to “influence” your session if you are logged into a service. If you are logged into your bank in one window, they can use malicious code from the evil site under their control to transfer funds and such.

I know a lot of exceptional security types over at McAfee so I don’t want to slam them too hard. This shows that in any large organization, web application security is a tough issue. Hopefully they will respond publicly, openly, and aggressively, which is really the best approach when you’ve been exposed like this.

Just a friendly reminder that you can’t trust anyone or anything on the Internet. Except us, of course.

Share: