For months, considered one of NASA’s web sites was weak to an open redirect flaw, permitting menace actors to redirect unsuspecting guests to malicious third social gathering touchdown pages. 

That is in response to cybersecurity researchers from the Cybernews staff, who mentioned there’s no proof of the flaw being abused within the wild, however that such a state of affairs is sort of possible.

Earlier this week, the Cybernews staff reported that its researchers found a flaw in NASA’s Astrobiology web site. The vulnerability permits menace actors to redirect the guests elsewhere, and the researchers consider hackers may need created an internet site seemingly equivalent to NASA’s.

Validating consumer enter

The faux web page might have a login immediate, a obtain button, or a faux fee gateway, tricking guests into downloading malware, making a gift of id knowledge, or cash. 

The least damaging state of affairs is the one the place hackers merely redirect folks to a web page with adverts and monetize the visits and clicks.

The staff additionally mentioned that one other safety researcher found the identical flaw independently in mid-January too. On condition that NASA failed to handle the vulnerability on its premises (regardless of being notified on time), there’s a excessive probability {that a} malicious actor found it as nicely, they are saying. 

To guard towards open redirect flaws, the Cybernews staff says web site house owners have to validate all consumer enter, together with URLs, to verify the enter solely incorporates legitimate values. 

“This will embody utilizing common expressions to confirm that URLs are in a correct format, checking that URLs are from trusted domains, and verifying that URLs don’t include any sudden or malicious characters,” the researchers mentioned.

One other technique is URL encoding, which prevents malicious characters from being injected into URLs. That successfully prevents menace actors from exploiting open redirect flaws even when they’re current on the web site. 

“Web site house owners can create a whitelist of trusted URLs and solely enable redirects to these URLs. This may help to forestall attackers from redirecting customers to malicious or unauthorized web sites,” the staff concluded.

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By way of: Cybernews