Yahoo account exploit selling on black market
Yahoo is investigating the claims of a hacker who is selling an exploit that apparently hijacks Yahoo mail accounts.
"The exploit, being sold for $US700 by an Egyptian hacker on an exclusive cybercrime forum, targets a cross-site scripting (XSS) weakness in yahoo.com that lets attackers steal cookies from Yahoo! Webmail users," wrote Brian Krebs, a noted security blogger who reported the illegal offer to Yahoo.
"Such a flaw would let attackers send or read email from the victim’s account. In a typical XSS attack, an attacker sends a malicious link to an unsuspecting user; if the user clicks the link, the script is executed, and can access cookies, session tokens or other sensitive information retained by the browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page."