Clickjacking 2017

The future: Long standing Web application security scourges such SQL Injection (SQLi), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) are finally under control. Remaining buffer overflow issues are considered fossilized evidence of a prior era. Cyber criminals out of necessity have evolved their attack portfolios to include Clickjacking as a preferred method for tricking their victims into propagating malware, defrauding themselves, and initiating other forms a malicious acts. Clickjacking, a long-known and fundamental design problem in the way the Web works, had not until 2017 garnered the respect necessary to be taken seriously. Now with significant damage increasing and loses mounting, the issue has forced website owners and browser developers to scramble for solutions to a problem nearly a decade in the making. Or so the story may go should history repeats itself.

By tracking the seminal papers/events of the more widely used attack techniques, it takes somewhere between 6 and 9 years for the bad guys to scale their exploits and cause enough damage where defenders are compelled to react. For example, Aleph One’s “Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit” was published in 1996, but it wasn’t until 2002 that Microsoft’s then CEO Bill Gates issued the famous “TrustWorthy Computing Memo.” A six year gap sparking the software security revolution. XSS experimentation began around 1997 with few appreciating its true power until 2005 (8 years). The Samy Worm, the first mass scale JavaScript malware Web Worm, infected over 1 million MySpace users in under 24 hours. In 1998 rain.forest.puppy published the first research into SQL Injection. Nine years later marked the beginning of mass Web page malware infections proving how truly vulnerable websites were. The first CSRF papers began appearing around the turn of the century, but no convincingly evidence of catastrophic attacks has yet to appear justifying remediation investment. So we wait, knowing full well it is only a matter of time.

Clickjacking, an issue known by some for at least several years as UI Redressing, it was not fully explored or advertised until 2008 with the Flash videojacking demonstration. While non-malicious experimentation is taking place targeting those such as Twitter, no major damaging incidents can be referenced. And perhaps there won’t be until sometime between 2014 and 2017 if historical timelines hold. If so, the upside is we have time to deal with the issue, but I doubt we will be any more prepared by then. More likely the problem will scale well beyond our control, just like the others, as Web-enabled devices increase exponentially built upon a system where security fundamentals are difficult to change. In the meantime I’m sure we will be having a lot of fun times dealing with XSS, SQLi, CSRF, Intranet Hacking, Flash Malware, Business Logic Flaws, and so on.