The data, tools, and procedures which, when applied to a specific vulnerability, predictably violate the security design of a system.
Questions tagged [exploit]
1264 questions
303
votes
3 answers
CRIME - How to beat the BEAST successor?
With the advent of CRIME, BEAST's successor, what possible protection is available for an individual and/or system owner in order to protect themselves and their users against this new attack on TLS?

Kyle Rosendo
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213
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5 answers
What is a specific example of how the Shellshock Bash bug could be exploited?
I read some articles (article1, article2, article3, article4) about the Shellshock Bash bug (CVE-2014-6271 reported Sep 24, 2014) and have a general idea of what the vulnerability is and how it could be exploited. To better understand the…

Rob Bednark
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193
votes
7 answers
How can I protect myself from this kind of clipboard abuse?
Clipboard abuse from websites
Many websites use JavaScript or CSS to stealthily insert or replace text in the user's clipboard whenever they copy information from the page. As far as I know this is mostly used for advertising purposes, but PoC for…

sam hocevar
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179
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9 answers
Can webcams be turned on without the indicator light?
I've made a series of penetration tests in my network and one of the things I've tried was to record webcam and microphone.
Recording an end-user's microphone seems to be a stealth thing, but what about the webcam?
In my tests, the indicator is…
user4610
142
votes
14 answers
What "hacking" competitions/challenges exist?
I have always enjoyed trying to gain access to things I'm not really supposed to play around with. I found Hack This Site a long time ago and I learned a lot from it. The issue I have with HTS is that they haven't updated their content in a very…

KilledKenny
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137
votes
2 answers
What is 'tabnabbing'?
Wikipedia is not very explicit on this,
The exploit employs scripts to rewrite a page of average interest with an impersonation of a well-known website, when left unattended for some time.
What is 'tabnabbing', how does one do it?

Matas Vaitkevicius
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127
votes
2 answers
How do ASLR and DEP work?
How do Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) work, in terms of preventing vulnerabilities from being exploited? Can they be bypassed?

Polynomial
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116
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7 answers
Can "cat-ing" a file be a potential security risk?
I often use cat on the console to view the contents of files, and every now and then I accidentally cat a binary file which basically produces gibberish and system beeps. However today I've encountered a situation where the output from the cat…

Ivan Kovacevic
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114
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5 answers
What should a website operator do about the Heartbleed OpenSSL exploit?
CVE-2014-0160
http://heartbleed.com
This is supposed to be a canonical question on dealing with the Heartbeat exploit.
I run an Apache web server with OpenSSL, as well as a few other utilities relying on OpenSSL (as client). What should I do to…

Deer Hunter
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109
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8 answers
Why do I hear about so many Java insecurities? Are other languages more secure?
I really like the Java programming language, but I continuously hear about how insecure it is. Googling 'java insecure' or 'java vulnerabilities' brings up multiple articles talking about why you should uninstall or disable Java to protect your…

gsgx
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103
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19 answers
How to explain to traditional people why they should upgrade their old Windows XP device?
This is an issue I'm recurringly facing: older people from my family (or people who my family members know) can be surprisingly reluctant to apply most basic security measures when they're using their PCs. The particular issues vary, but this time…

gaazkam
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94
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3 answers
Stack Overflows - Defeating Canaries, ASLR, DEP, NX
To prevent buffer overflows, there are several protections available such as using Canary values, ASLR, DEP, NX. But, where there is a will, there is a way. I am researching on the various methods an attacker could possibly bypass these protection…

sudhacker
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92
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4 answers
I was tricked on Facebook into downloading an obfuscated script
I got a notification on Facebook: "(a friend of mine) mentioned you in a comment". However, when I clicked it, Firefox tried to download the following file:
comment_24016875.jse
This is an obfuscated script which seems to download an executable…

Nacib Neme
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81
votes
13 answers
Is divide-by-zero a security vulnerability?
Even though sometimes software bugs and vulnerabilities are deemed as the same concept, there must be at least one distinct aspect between them, and I think the most prominent one is exploitability (the latter one having the property).
What I'm…

Gwangmu Lee
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80
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6 answers
Can malicious code fit in 14 bytes?
I was reading this The New York Times (NYT) article about the hack of Jeff Bezos's phone. The article states:
The May 2018 message that contained the innocuous-seeming video file, with a tiny 14-byte chunk of malicious code, came out of the…

Stud Sterkel
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