Session Hijacking

session hijacking is the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many web sites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim's computer (see HTTP cookie theft).A popular method is using source-routed IP packets. This allows a hacker at point A on the network to participate in a conversation between B and C by encouraging the IP packets to pass through its machine.If source-routing is turned off, the hacker can use "blind" hijacking, whereby it guesses the responses of the two machines. Thus, the hacker can send a command, but can never see the response. However, a common command would be to set a password allowing access from somewhere else on the net.A hacker can also be "inline" between B and C using a sniffing program to watch the conversation. This is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack".A common component of such an attack is to execute a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against one end-point to stop it from responding. This attack can be either against the machine to force it to crash, or against the network connection to force heavy packet loss.

Video demo - www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_u3g95bzIE&feature=player_embedded

Posted in: XSS