Many 'Hacker Safe' Web Sites Found Vulnerable

[OhioChick]

Computer scientists say that more than 60 sites certified as safe by McAfee's ScanAlert service have been vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
January 17, 2008 03:00 PM


More than 60 Web sites certified to be "Hacker Safe" by McAfee's ScanAlert service have been vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks over the past year, including the ScanAlert Web site itself. While the XSS hole in the ScanAlert site and others have been addressed, some apparently have not been, leaving visitors potentially vulnerable to client-side attacks.
Joseph Pierini, director of enterprise services for the ScanAlert "Hacker Safe" program, maintains that XSS vulnerabilities can't be used to hack a server.

Still, Kevin Fernandez and Dimitris Pagkalos, two computer scientists who maintain XSSed.com, a site that has been tracking XSS vulnerabilities since February 2007, provided InformationWeek with a list of 62 Web sites certified as "Hacker Safe" on which XSS holes have been reported. The list includes brookstone.com, cafepress.com, cduniverse.com, gnc.com, mysecurewallet.nl, petsmart.com, and sportsauthority.com, among other familiar brands.

The XSSed.com site tracks whether reported XSS flaws have been fixed, but such information may not be accurate if the site making the repairs, or the initial discoverer of the hole, fails to report the fix. While XSSed.com data doesn't specifically correlate the presence of a "Hacker Safe" badge on a site with the time when an XSS vulnerability was active -- the certification could have been withdrawn while the hole was present and then reinstated -- security researchers report that some sites currently certified as "Hacker Safe" also are currently vulnerable to XSS attacks.

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