New vulnerability in Facebook leads to leakage of users' personal data.

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Information security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in the social networking site Facebook - this error could lead to leaks of confidential information about users and their friends. An error was found in the social network search function.

What is the problem

According to researcher Ron Masas from Imperva, the page on which the search results are displayed includes iFrame-related items. The final URLs of these iFrame are not protected from cross-site request forgery (CSRF) cross-site request forgery attacks.

To exploit a vulnerability, an attacker needs to trick users into visiting a special site. It is important that the user is logged in to your Facebook profile. When any click on the web page in the background, JavaScript code will be executed. This code opens a new tab with the Facebook URL, in which a predefined request is executed in order to get the information the attacker needs.



This attack can be used both to search for “photo from vacation” information and to extract more sensitive data, including:

• whether the user has friends with a specific name or a keyword in the profile name;
• which pages the user liked and the groups he belongs to;
• Does he have friends subscribed to a specific page?
• availability of photos from certain locations or countries;
• whether the user has posted entries containing certain keywords;
• Does he have friends of a particular religion?
• etc.

Thus, the vulnerability reveals sensitive user data, even if they set privacy settings that prohibit outsiders to show such information.

The process can be repeated many times without the need to open new tabs. As a result, this attack represents the greatest danger for mobile users - it is more difficult for them to track the opening of new tabs.

How to protect

Researchers turned to Facebook, and the company has already removed the vulnerability. Social network engineers added protection against CSRF attacks.

When development is put on stream due to the high demand for services and products, more and more developers are implementing continuous integration and delivery (CI / CD) processes. An integral part of CI / CD is ensuring the security of the software being developed. It is especially important to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities accurately and on the job. However, in practice, not everything is so simple.

Many people mistakenly believe that analyzing the quality of the code is enough to check the software, including the security risks. And those who understand that this is not the case, and resorts to the security analysis tools, are faced with the problem of verification of vulnerabilities. It is usually performed manually, and given the fact that the number of vulnerabilities can reach hundreds and thousands, the effectiveness of the CI / CD process and the expediency of supporting it are a big question.

On Thursday, November 22 at 14:00 , Alexey Zhukov, an expert of the application protection systems department at Positive Technologies, will hold a free webinar. In its course, you will learn how to ensure that in conditions of continuous processes, large volumes and burning deadlines, security defects do not go unnoticed, and their verification does not become a bottleneck. Alexey will talk about how to intelligently automate the process of ensuring the security of software and improve the efficiency of performing basic tasks. The webinar will be useful for DevOps developers and experts.

To participate in the webinar you need to register .