SPI Labs has discovered a practical method of using JavaScript to detect the
search queries a user has entered into arbitrary search engines. All the code
needed to steal a user's search queries is written in JavaScript and uses
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This code could be embedded into any website
either by the website owner or by a malicious third party through a Cross-site
Scripting (XSS) attack. There it would harvest information about every visitor
to that site.
Possible uses:
-HMO's website could check if a visitor has been searching other sites about
cancer, cancer treatments, or drug rehab centers.
-Advertising networks could gather information about which topics someone is
interested based on their search history and use that to echance their customer
databases.
-Government websites could see if a visitor has been searching for bomb-making
instructions.
SPI has published a whitepaper about this technique and has also release proof
of concept code that will steal search engine queries. Works solid in Firefox,
and IE support is a little shaky on multi word queries.
Whitepaper: http://www.spidynamics.com/assets/documents/JS_SearchQueryTheft.pdf
Proof of Concept: http://www.spidynamics.com/spilabs/js-search/index.html
Have fun,
Billy Hoffman
--
Lead R&D Engineer
SPI Dynamics - http://www.spidynamics.com <http://www.spidynamics.com/>
Phone: 678-781-4800
Direct: 678-781-4845
_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
