Author Archives: Les Jones

How easy? This easy.

Firesheep is a new Firefox plugin that makes it easy for you to hijack other people’s social network connections. Basically, Facebook authenticates clients with cookies. If someone is using a public WiFi connection, the cookies are sniffable. Firesheep uses wincap to capture and display the authentication information for accounts it sees, allowing you to hijack the connection.

Slides from the Toorcon talk.

Protect yourself by forcing the authentication to happen over TLS. Or stop logging in to Facebook from public networks.

Chris Wage from Nashville’s Centre Source posted a more technical description.

Robert Graham has some additional notes:

First of all, the plug-in “Force-TLS” does not protect you, as some have suggested. I proved this with Twitter, where I was able to sidejack the connection with both FireSheep and Hamster. I’m not sure what Force-TLS does, but it doesn’t force a connection to be TLS/SSL. I configured *.twitter.com (the domain and all subdomains), and the URL “http://twitter.com” still appeared in the address bar.

Second, FireSheep works only as well as the underlying packet-capture. On a Macintosh, the adapter can be fully promiscuous, capturing everybody’s traffic on the local access-point. On Windows, some adapters (like Broadcom) will see all the traffic, others (like Intel) will only see your own traffic (useful for watching which of your own websites can be sidejacked, but not useful for sidejacking others).

If you’re interested in experimenting with Firesheep, Phoneboy cautions that using it may be illegal, so the  usual legal precautions apply.

Age of the Script Kiddie

In the hacking world, there are elite hackers who write their own tools to exploit computer vulnerabilities. Then there are script kiddies – people who don’t really know how to hack anything, but who have enough technical skills to run various hacking programs that somebody else wrote and put into an easy-to-use package. If the Mac was the computer for the rest of us, then script kiddie software is hacking for the rest of us.

Firesheep is the latest step in the trend of kiddie-friendly hacking software. It brings the technical qualifications for being a script kiddie down to being able to install a Firefox browser plug-in. It’s No Script Kiddie Left Behind. Firesheep is already putting pressure on companies like Facebook whose Web sites are vulnerable to cookie session hijacking – Facebook Responds to Firesheep WiFi Security Controversy.