5 ms·

Anyone who wanted to hijack http sessions was five minutes of Googling and installing away from being able to do so before "Eric Butler's little gift" anyways.

by jfager 16y ago

Anyone who wanted to hijack http sessions was five minutes of Googling and installing away from being able to do so before "Eric Butler's little gift" anyways. Are you claiming that the marginal impact of packaging it up into a firefox extension is so great as to make it a threat of a wholly different kind?

ramanujan 16y ago
That is exactly what I'm claiming. That's also why this article has 200+ comments and was on the top of Hacker News all day! You vastly underestimate the barrier that "five minutes of Googling" presents. I assure you, the overwhelming majority of aspiring script kiddies would never be able to figure it out. It took an expert to package an exploit in a nice GUI (and write cookie parsing code for every major social site under the sun).
- jfager 16y ago
  As long as only the minimally motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha. How about instead of shooting the messenger, you take some of that righteous anger and point it at the companies with millions/billions to spend who have simply ignored a longstanding known issue?
  - ramanujan 16y ago
    How about you recognize that there are a lot of innocent people who will be hurt by this stunt? There are hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of people who are targets for this, and most don't have a spare million lying around. Hospitals, nonprofit groups, anyone running a website has to drop everything to lock it all down now. The effect is a lot like loosing a new virus (and might ultimately be treated that way). > As long as only the highly motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha. ^ This modified statement is correct. All I'm saying that making something easy to use and publicizing it widely is going to result in a lot more people using it. [Edits - hey jfager, I don't know you from adam and don't particularly enjoy flamewars. I agree that in the long run this should be fixed, ideally in such a way that 99.99% of people can blissfully go about their day. I just wish that the energy to secure stuff had taken the form of (say) a post on "here's how Google converted Gmail to https" rather than Firesheep. Hope we can find some common ground and you can see my POV.]
    - jfager 16y ago
      The intersection of 'evil enough to do something truly malicious', 'read a tech blog in the right 24-hour period', 'didn't already know the problem existed', and 'in enough cafes to pair with enough potential victims' is too low to cause "millions" more to be impacted by this, I promise. Your implicit definition of 'highly motivated' (someone willing to put in 5 minutes of Googling) makes me sad. I'm agitated because you're trying to hang someone for doing A Good Thing: putting real pressure on the bigs to finally actually fix a well-known, longstanding problem. [Response to your edit: Facebook, Twitter, and other big sites know about the problem. How would explaining to them how Google secured Gmail change anything? They know how Google secured Gmail, and they know how to secure their own services. They just simply aren't, because it saves them money and their customers aren't demanding it. But the only reason their customers aren't demanding it is because the vast majority of their customers don't know the threat exists. This tool makes the threat clear as day to the most unsophisticated layperson, which makes it real, effective pressure, far more than yet another blog post asking nicely for SSL by default].
      - bonaldi 16y ago
        It might make you sad, but it's spot on. People were sharing MP3 files on usenet pretty easily, back in the day. It would have taken 5 minutes or less to work out how -- even easier than grabbing cookies. It wasn't until Napster made that 0 minutes of googling that MP3 filesharing really took off. For something like this to end up on millions of desktops, you have to be able to explain it to a half-stoned frat at a party. "Five minutes of googling and then some nerdery"? No chance. "Install this, go to the quad and you can sign into the facebook of any other person there?" Yup, that's going to spread like wildfire.
        daten 16y ago
        The responsibility is with every admin that setup an insecure access point, not with every security researcher to stay quiet about widely known and widely exploited vulnerabilities. This isn't new. Point and click tools for doing this existed 10 years ago. Making a firefox plugin just pushed it back to the top of the headlines. This is actually a good thing because if word spreads more people will be aware of the already existing risk and will be more security conscious. Does this mean everyone should stop logging into their personal accounts over unsecure wifi at school or starbucks? ABSOLUTELY. Hopefully this new attention on an old hole will motivate more admins to fix their networks and more users to realize how vulnerable they are.

by jfager 16y ago

ramanujan 16y ago

That is exactly what I'm claiming. That's also why this article has 200+ comments and was on the top of Hacker News all day! You vastly underestimate the barrier that "five minutes of Googling" presents. I assure you, the overwhelming majority of aspiring script kiddies would never be able to figure it out. It took an expert to package an exploit in a nice GUI (and write cookie parsing code for every major social site under the sun).

jfager 16y ago
As long as only the minimally motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha. How about instead of shooting the messenger, you take some of that righteous anger and point it at the companies with millions/billions to spend who have simply ignored a longstanding known issue?
- ramanujan 16y ago
  How about you recognize that there are a lot of innocent people who will be hurt by this stunt? There are hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of people who are targets for this, and most don't have a spare million lying around. Hospitals, nonprofit groups, anyone running a website has to drop everything to lock it all down now. The effect is a lot like loosing a new virus (and might ultimately be treated that way). > As long as only the highly motivated can exploit it, it's not really a problem, gotcha. ^ This modified statement is correct. All I'm saying that making something easy to use and publicizing it widely is going to result in a lot more people using it. [Edits - hey jfager, I don't know you from adam and don't particularly enjoy flamewars. I agree that in the long run this should be fixed, ideally in such a way that 99.99% of people can blissfully go about their day. I just wish that the energy to secure stuff had taken the form of (say) a post on "here's how Google converted Gmail to https" rather than Firesheep. Hope we can find some common ground and you can see my POV.]
  - jfager 16y ago
    The intersection of 'evil enough to do something truly malicious', 'read a tech blog in the right 24-hour period', 'didn't already know the problem existed', and 'in enough cafes to pair with enough potential victims' is too low to cause "millions" more to be impacted by this, I promise. Your implicit definition of 'highly motivated' (someone willing to put in 5 minutes of Googling) makes me sad. I'm agitated because you're trying to hang someone for doing A Good Thing: putting real pressure on the bigs to finally actually fix a well-known, longstanding problem. [Response to your edit: Facebook, Twitter, and other big sites know about the problem. How would explaining to them how Google secured Gmail change anything? They know how Google secured Gmail, and they know how to secure their own services. They just simply aren't, because it saves them money and their customers aren't demanding it. But the only reason their customers aren't demanding it is because the vast majority of their customers don't know the threat exists. This tool makes the threat clear as day to the most unsophisticated layperson, which makes it real, effective pressure, far more than yet another blog post asking nicely for SSL by default].
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      It might make you sad, but it's spot on. People were sharing MP3 files on usenet pretty easily, back in the day. It would have taken 5 minutes or less to work out how -- even easier than grabbing cookies. It wasn't until Napster made that 0 minutes of googling that MP3 filesharing really took off. For something like this to end up on millions of desktops, you have to be able to explain it to a half-stoned frat at a party. "Five minutes of googling and then some nerdery"? No chance. "Install this, go to the quad and you can sign into the facebook of any other person there?" Yup, that's going to spread like wildfire.
      - daten 16y ago
        The responsibility is with every admin that setup an insecure access point, not with every security researcher to stay quiet about widely known and widely exploited vulnerabilities. This isn't new. Point and click tools for doing this existed 10 years ago. Making a firefox plugin just pushed it back to the top of the headlines. This is actually a good thing because if word spreads more people will be aware of the already existing risk and will be more security conscious. Does this mean everyone should stop logging into their personal accounts over unsecure wifi at school or starbucks? ABSOLUTELY. Hopefully this new attention on an old hole will motivate more admins to fix their networks and more users to realize how vulnerable they are.