The marketing team of all major companies stays vigilant about the illegal way of hijacking cookies. In recent years, the incidents of cyberattacks such as this have increased to a significant extent. According to a credible study conducted lately, over thirty-one percent of e-commerce applications are prone to cookie or session hijacking.
Threat actors perform cookie hijacking to gain unauthorized access to an online account. With each passing day, the techniques malicious actors employ to hijack cookies are becoming scarier. They can quickly obtain all your confidential or sensitive information mentioned on different sites or applications.
The risk of session hijacking is increasing as people rely on online services and become an integral part of the digital ecosystem. The effects could be highly destructive in the coming times if one avoids taking appropriate preventive measures. Keep reading to enrich your knowledge of session hijacking and threat actors' methods for hijacking cookies.
When Does Session Hijacking Occur?
The moment a threat actor gains access to an online session of a user, it is right then a session hijacking takes place. You must know that when one login to a website or web app, automatically, the server adds a temporary session cookie in the web browser. Doing so enables the remote server to recognize everyone logged in and verified.
Attackers require to know an individual's session cookie to perform session hijacking. In addition, they need a user's session ID to carry out the hijacking of cookies. They employ different techniques to get hold of what they seek. Most of the time, they succeed in deceiving users into clicking malicious links containing a created session ID in each of their web browser sessions.
The method they follow ends up making the server believe that the threat actor's connection is similar to the actual user's session. They can do whatever they feel right after customer journey hijacking. Activities they can perform after hijacking depends on the targeted site. But, here's what threat actors mostly do once they hijack session cookies.
- Making a purchase of items in a fraudulent manner
- Unauthorized access to a user's sensitive personal information increases the risk of identity theft
- Steal confidential business data
- Access to credit card credentials helps threat actors drain a victim's bank account
Cookies help validate users in SSO systems, which is why large business enterprises may go through the worst possible scenario if malicious actors hijack session cookies. Once they succeed in the attack, they gain access to many web applications right away. They will have complete control over the company's user databases, financial systems, and storage locations containing valuable IP.
Typical Ways of Session Cookie Hijacking
Session Cookie Sniffing
Threat actors use a packet-like sniffer to perform cookie session sniffing. They do so for intercepting and logging packets as they keep flowing across a connection of networks. Session sniffing lets an actor find session cookies, which are a part of the network, and steal the cookies. Leverage the appropriate tool for session hijacking prevention with utmost effectiveness.
A website becomes more vulnerable to session sniffing during the use of SSL encryption on the login page. It prevents attackers from having access to the password that a user enters. Session hijacking attacks are effortless for malicious actors if the rest of the site pages do not have an SSL certificate.
Traffic monitoring on the network is easier when actors make use of packet sniffing. Wi-Fi networks that are public type are more prone to session cookie hijacking. Hackers can control the network traffic completely once they log in and use a packet sniffer. They can do so because of the lack of user validation for the network.
Session Cookie Fixation
Attacks like session fixation end up exploiting a system's vulnerability, allowing attackers to fixate the session ID of a user. A website accepts the IDs of a session from URLs through phishing attempts when they perform session cookie fixation.
Suppose, threat actors email an inappropriate link, which consists of a specific session ID, to a user they target. They have a clear idea about the used session ID once the targeted user opens the link to log in to a website. These infiltrators use the session ID to perform the process of session hijacking.
Another technique does not even require a user to log in to a website. They find and set the session with the sole objective of spying on the users as well as monitoring whatever information they enter. The malicious attackers log the user in themselves, and it is then the user site with their authentication.
Prevent Session Hijacking with the Best Solution
Threat actors even resort to cross-site scripting for session cookie hijacking, which is why you must harness the potential of Affitraps. This automated tracking tool that the expert team at Virus Positive Technologies develops is excellent in the identification of cookie stuffing.