New GMail Flaw Lets Anyone Read Your E-Mail
Hackers have revealed that your GMail account is vulnerable to an attack that allows malicious folks to keep tabs on your e-mail traffic. The attack uses a clever (and particularly nasty) cross-site request forgery (CSRF) to create a persistent backdoor that can be used to read your e-mail. The exploit works by creating a new filter in your GMail account, which means it can do pretty much anything GMail filters are capable of — including forward your e-mail to another account.
GNUCitizen hacker Petko Petkov is a busy man, we told you about his PDF exploit last week and before that there was the Quicktime exploit. Petkov is also responsible for today’s GMail disclosure and while he hasn’t released many details on the hack, he did demonstrate it for ZDNet, who confirmed that it works.
Google says it is looking into the exploit, but even if it’s patched, anyone affected before the patch will continue to be exploited since the filter must be removed by hand.
