Cross-site scripting vulnerability found on Photobucket

Few days back I found a serious  Cross-sie scripting (XSS) Vulnerability on Photobucket.com; which  known for its image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing services.This vulnerability can be used to hijack sessions and malware spreading.Photobucket’s global alexa rank is 202 which means millions of people who visit it daily are in risk which makes it a serious issue.

Cross-Site Scripting attacks are a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user.

An attacker can use XSS to send a malicious script to an unsuspecting user. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, and will execute the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, the malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by your browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.

I reported this vulnerability to the Security team of photobucket and now it is patched.

Here is the proof of concept.