Is it possible for someone to make a purposefully vulnerable site then lure users to his site where he then takes advantage of that vulnerability to hack their social media accounts etc? If so how?
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1See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/172582/do-drive-by-attacks-exist-in-modern-browsers – mti2935 Oct 28 '20 at 21:38
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Here's a takeaway: "..Is it possible for someone to make a purposefully vulnerable site then take advantage of that vulnerability to hack the users?.." Yes. – CriticalSYS Oct 28 '20 at 21:54
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@CriticalSYS How tho? – mohamed elgamal Oct 28 '20 at 21:57
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Although not directly, the owner can place a hook on his site, where after he takes advantage of different known methods such as drive-by downloads like @mti2935 said, reverse shells, etc. – CriticalSYS Oct 28 '20 at 22:00
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what about something like stealing cookies can you do that @CriticalSYS? – mohamed elgamal Oct 28 '20 at 22:02
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1Fundamentally that's what a **Honeypot** is, but the users are generally malicious actors. – user10216038 Oct 28 '20 at 22:04
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A second example would be that a reputable team behind a website replaces It's updates/software with a trojan or more disastrously that a server fetches and installs that "legitimate software" from that site automatically. – CriticalSYS Oct 28 '20 at 22:31
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2I don't think the site would be vulnerable, but rather malicious in nature. – multithr3at3d Oct 28 '20 at 23:18
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It's not a honeypot, but an exploit kit. – ThoriumBR Oct 29 '20 at 00:42
1 Answers
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Is it possible for someone to make a purposefully vulnerable site
Yes.
then take advantage of that vulnerability to hack the users?
Yes but, he doesn't need the vulnerability.
When we talk about a vulnerable site, that usually means it allows anyone to do some action which was not intended by the owner. For example, a vulnerable StackOverflow site could allow anyone to log in under the account of someone else. However, if I was the owner of StackOverflow and wanted to take over your account I wouldn't need to exploit a vulnerability on the page. I could do that directly (such as manually changing your password to something else).
The main reason I can think for that would be for plausible deniability / looking inept rather than malicious.
Ángel
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What about if there was no user interaction any farther than simply opening the website ? – mohamed elgamal Oct 29 '20 at 13:12
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@mohamedelgamal and the website would be vulnerable in what sense? I'm not understanding your question. – Ángel Oct 29 '20 at 21:40
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like it would be vulnerable to some sort of web app vuln that would allow it to hack its users social media/work/personal accounts on the users laptop. For example something that would allow it to steal cookies. That is just an example tho. – mohamed elgamal Oct 30 '20 at 19:24
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The app doesn't need to be vulnerable. It can already see its own cookies. You might be thinking on stealing cookies of a different website, but it's not the that would need to be vulnerable, but the user browser which is not supposed to give your Gmail cookies to StackOverflow. – Ángel Oct 30 '20 at 22:03