Are You Ready For The Ajax Attacks?

Filed in archive AJAX on August 7, 2006

Ajax is currently being treated as one of the hottest things in the field of web development and it has caught the attention of cybercriminals. They have found out that Ajax could be utilized to their advantage in a number of ways. If they corrupted one of the dozens of data exchanges which Ajax handled while loading a web page they could take over control of the computer. The Black Hat cybersecurity conference which was held recently highlighted what kind of Ajax attacks could take place and how one could defend against them. At the conference it was demonstrated how Ajax attacks could be used to break into and manipulate online stock trading accounts. The conference which was well attended also demonstrated how hackers could spread an Ajax attack through MySpace as a way of releasing an invasive program deep inside a company's internal network.

Just go through some of the attacks which shook the cyber world:

Recent high-profile attacks include June's Yamanner computer worm, designed to harvest e-mail addresses from Yahoo mail users and send them to spammers in Europe; and Spaceflash, which installed adware (advertisements and tracking programs implanted surreptitiously) on the hard drives of more than a million MySpace users.

Those for-profit intrusions were foreshadowed by last October's milestone Samy worm. Created by a youthful hacker, Samy used an Ajax attack to infect a million MySpace users for the express purpose of adding them to the hacker's friends list -- to make him seem popular. MySpace had to shut down for a day to clean up Samy.

These attacks are just the tip of the iceberg. In future get ready for attacks which would get better and better.