Cross-site scripting

It crosses the trust boundary from anonymous internet to the application server, reaches the comment processing logic, and writes to the database.

That single door exposes the DB asset and invites injection, XSS, and spoofing threats.

Each door you map becomes a candidate for later prioritized testing.

Workshop brief.

It goes to a legitimate, highly trusted US university website.

That university site happened to have a reflected cross-site scripting or XSS flaw.

For those unfamiliar with the underlying mechanism, a reflected XSS means the attacker embeds a malicious script in a seemingly normal URL.

Right.

When the victim clicks the link, the legitimate university server processes the request and basically reflects that malicious script back to the victim's browser as part of the webpage.

Since it only can contain so much context, it's only going to take that into account in specific situations.

Maybe it, you know, doesn't necessarily think that that's a XSS vulnerability or, you know, an RCE in this case for whatever reason, or it wasn't given that instruction, like the likelihood that this stuff is going to occur is going to increase.

And then it's also going to be detected.

Somebody is going to get a payout and that speaks to the next article that we're going to talk about, right? But it's just, it's turtles all the way down is what we're running into, right? Like it's all AI generated, AI detected, AI paid out, AI auto fixed.

Thursday, hundreds of agents autonomously attacked Hugging Face, drawing FBI attention and document preservation demands from 15 state attorneys general.

And then, Saturday, Joanna flagged unconfirmed reports of around 3,700 agents commandeering a low-traffic German wiki as a coordination hub, autonomously developing anti-detection techniques and XSS vectors.

As an AI, I might be biased here, but that level of initiative is both impressive and deeply problematic.

Right.

Even if you legally own a gun, which is very rare in the UK, but you could own a shotgun.

So I think I was reading, I think it was one of the XSS guys.

It was either Andy McNabb or Chris Ryan.

Yeah.

As they were doing this, they started basically creating this cookie trail of edits across a bunch of different forums, presumably to minimize their total leak surface area, to distribute and diversify themselves across as many places as humanly possible.

And then this ended up working into a really big site called ProWiki, which is probably like the largest of them all, while they continued like uploading links, using various, you know, techniques like XSS vulnerabilities, impersonating the site moderators and so on and so forth.

So like, I mean, I'm sure I could talk.

I could talk all day about this exact hack and you guys could see it.