A Chrome Bug Allowed Hackers to Extract Your Private Data From Facebook and Other Web Platforms

A new chrome bug allows attackers to extract private data that stored on Facebook and from other web platforms. The bug affects all the browsers including Chrome that use Blink browser engine. According to StatCounter, Chrome used by 59% of the Internet population.

The chrome bug takes advantage over the Audio/Video HTML tags that used in generating the requests from the target source. Imperva security researcher Ron Masas uncovered the bug with video and audio tags while researching with different HTML tags for cross-origin communications.

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing is a mechanism that uses HTTP headers to instruct web browsers and servers on how to utilize the cross-domain resources. It defines a way on how to request remote URLs when they have privileged.

Chrome Bug To Extract Private Data

Ron Masas found that the Audio/Video HTML failed to validate the content types, an attacker could inject hidden video or audio tags that request the crafted posts from Facebook that posted based on the restriction techniques.

When the user visits the attacker’s webpage which contains hidden video or audio tags that would request Facebook posts and by analyzing the request of which specific posts are called for the user the attackers able to extract the logged social networking individual user age from Facebook regardless of privacy settings within seconds.

Ron Masas created a javascript function that returns an estimation of a resource size, see “estimate_cross_origin_resource“

An attacker can create crafted Facebook posts for all possible age based by using the Audience Restriction options that limits the visibility of the posts based on the age, location, gender, and other properties.

“With several scripts running at once each testing a different and unique restriction, the bad actor can relatively quickly mine a good amount of private data about the user. With the e-commerce or a SaaS site attackers even could extract login email address to correlate the private data for extensive and intrusive profiling.”

Now the issue has been fixed with Chrome 68 and users are strongly recommended to update with the latest version of chrome browser. The vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-6177.

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