A weekend phishing attack and more XSS zero-day proof-of-concept code are testing the social networking site's security mettle

More trouble in MySpace: The social networking site is now under the threat of two new zero-day bugs that have been released in the form of proof-of-concept code. The new bugs come after a weekend during which MySpace shut down a major phishing attack that had reportedly spread to around 3,000 pages on the site.

Two hackers have released POC code for XSS fragmentation exploits, demonstrating that MySpace's patch last week for a previously released XSS fragmentation vulnerability didn't truly fix the problem. (See MySpace Hacker: Fix Is Flawed and Zero Day Flaw Found in MySpace.)

The phishing attack, meanwhile, launched from a profile page using a specially-crafted HTML that hid the real MySpace page content and instead showed the nefarious one, according to NetCraft, which says it has reported the attack to MySpace. The spoofed login page tried to lure a user into providing his or her username and password, and then would send it to a remote server in France.

Phishing isn't all MySpace has had to worry about lately. The hacker who first introduced an XSS fragmentation POC bug, kuza55, has released yet another one showing how MySpace's patch for the first one didn't quite cut it. And the second researcher has released yet another POC for the same type of vulnerability that takes only a few seconds to deploy.

MySpace's incomplete XSS fragmentation patch reflects a common problem among Websites, security experts say: Developers need to understand not only their HTML browsers but also XSS nuances, or they can get owned by some variant of XSS.

"It seemed like MySpace could still be vulnerable to XSS fragmentation attacks, and surprise, surprise, they are," says kuza55.

Kuza55 says the reason MySpace's didn't go far enough was because there are plenty more XSS attack vectors than the one he used, and his new one is nearly identical, save for some punctuation. He changed the single quotes to grave accents, which only works in IE and Netscape 8.1.

MySpace had not yet responded to press inquiries when this story was posted.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

About the Author(s)

Kelly Jackson Higgins, Editor-in-Chief, Dark Reading

Kelly Jackson Higgins is the Editor-in-Chief of Dark Reading. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise Magazine, Virginia Business magazine, and other major media properties. Jackson Higgins was recently selected as one of the Top 10 Cybersecurity Journalists in the US, and named as one of Folio's 2019 Top Women in Media. She began her career as a sports writer in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, and earned her BA at William & Mary. Follow her on Twitter @kjhiggins.

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