Category Archives: Breaking stuff

ShapeShifter: The emperor’s new web security technology

Disclaimer: Everything that I say in this blog post about ShapeSecurity and their ShapeShifter product, is based on their YouTube video, their description of their product on their pages, and an article on PandoDaily. As such, the product may be … Continue reading

Posted in Breaking stuff | 6 Comments

Detecting Ghostery

I discovered Ghostery in the summer of 2012, when I was researching web-tracking and specifically web-tracking done through web fingerprinting. Ghostery is a really cool browser extension which helped me identify the domains that popular web fingerprinters used to deliver … Continue reading

Posted in Breaking stuff | 19 Comments

Breaking McAfee’s Social Protection

On my usual daily visit of Slashdot, I read that McAfee introduced a new application called “McAfee Social Protection” for Facebook. In a nutshell, you install their plugin, allow their application to control quite a bit of your Facebook and … Continue reading

Posted in Breaking stuff | 8 Comments

To Google Chrome: Relax less…

I’ve been recently reading Michal Zalewski’s “The Tangled Web”, a book which tries to map the whole security landscape around browsers and Web applications in about 300 pages… it does a pretty good job 🙂 Now, in Chapter 9, he … Continue reading

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El cheapo hosting, le open redirect…

Did you know that if you use a popular cheap web hosting product and you haven’t changed the default error pages of your sites, you are most likely hosting an open redirect? If not, read on 🙂 Suppose for a … Continue reading

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Firefox and Self-XSS

I still remember the good old days when I would just write “javascript:alert(document.cookie)” in my address bar and the browser would happily show me the JavaScript-accessible cookie values for the current domain. These were simpler days… Mid-2011 the developers of … Continue reading

Posted in Breaking stuff | 4 Comments

Bypassing Chrome’s Anti-XSS filter

Its been a while since my last post so I decided to make it worthwhile :). I was recently checking a friend’s site for the classic Web application vulnerabilities, when I found a reflected XSS attack. While I was investigating … Continue reading

Posted in Breaking stuff | 31 Comments