Fw: Searchengine vulnerability (i.e Lycos)

From: SRL Office (bugtraq@sentry-labs.com)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2001 - 10:28:35 PDT

  • Next message: Petter Reinholdtsen: "Re: Opera Browser Heap Overflow (Session Replay Attack)"

     I informed lycos already about this some dasys before and I think they
     recognized it, even the answer seemed to be totaly wrong to the case *?*.
     maybe olther engines are vulnerable to this too, so I decieded to inform
     public about this.
    
     ----
    
     While searching some perl http query module for a new project I discoverd
     some really strange behaviour of the lycos search engine. It seems that the
     engine does not correctly handle html code written as html encoded text on
     the indexed page.
    
     example:
    
     page: <input>
     engine: <input>
    
     the encoded string will be returned to the user with > instead of  $gt; and
     the users browser will create a input field (it handels it as correct html
     code).
    
    
     Why is it dangerous?
    
     A malicious user may create a interface embended into the engines pages
     (wrose if it's supprts php, building a shell is esay =P) or start a
    redirect
     attack.
    
     example:
    
     A user creates a page with thousends of hidden words on his page to surely
    get indexed and found esaily (maybe sex and other often queried words).
    
     he will embended hidden code into his site (on top, this is always shown by
     default if no meta describtion exists) like
    
     &lt;script language=&quot;javacript&quot;&gt;
     window.open(&quot;spampage.htm&quot;) &lt;/script&gt;
    
    The engine will create html code and every time this site is access user
     will be spammed. The malicious user may insert new javascript or other code
     into the opened window and do whatever he wants to (maybe java which starts
     a auto hack? Bam! Socket connections to server and client  is allowed in
     java =) ).
    
     Hopefuly this is not a general issue or otherwise it may be a new way of
     spamming users or do more malicious things  =(
    
    
     Siberian
     CSC Sentry research Labs
     (www.sentry-labs.com)
    



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