What Are the Common Techniques of Cookie Hijacking?

Posted by Selins Jesse on May 17th, 2023

In recent years, incidents related to cyber-attacks have increased to a significant extent. Confidential or sensitive data of individuals as well as entities are more vulnerable than ever to cyber threats. Threat actors gain access in an unauthorized way to networks, computer systems, or devices. Their prime motive behind such illegal activities is to modify, steal or damage crucial data.

The attackers employ a range of techniques to carry out cookie hijacking in an effortless and effective manner. And unfortunately, the majority of people or businesses remain unaware of unauthorized deeds for a long time that threat actors perform. Over thirty-one percent of e-store apps are prone to session hijacking nowadays. 

Keep reading to enrich your knowledge of sessions, hijacking a session, and typical ways of session cookie hijacking.

What are Sessions?

Whenever you view a web page, entering your username as well as password is something you need to do every time. There was a requirement for a way to track the state between different connections from a particular user. The sole objective was to avoid requesting the user to perform re-authentication between every click in a web app.

Sessions act like a series of constant interactions between a network or server and a device. The creation of a session takes place whenever a user logins to a web application. Doing so helps maintain the state as well as works as a reference when a user makes any future requests. Web apps use these sessions to track user-related parameters.

Sessions remain fully active when users stay logged in to a particular system. The sessions become inactive when a user logs out or there’s no activity for a certain period of time. The deletion of the user’s data from the assigned memory space occurs right away automatically.

Session Hijacking: What is It?

A session cookie hijacking happens when attackers take over a user session. The server immediately includes a temporary session cookie in a user’s web browser once they log in to a web app. The remote server understands that a verified user has logged in. Session hijacking requires threat actors to know about the session cookie before beginning their illegal deed. 

Malicious actors attack client authentication on the internet and for which they need a user’s session ID. These ill-minded individuals steal the session cookie or mislead the user into clicking on a harmful link to gain the session ID. 

It is easier for attackers to gain control of your session once they use the session ID they have stolen in their web browser. The server fails to differentiate between an authentic user’s session and the connection of threat actors. They can perform anything according to their wish when they hijack a session. 

Typical Session Hijacking Methods

Session Fixation 

This kind of hijacking session or cookies is all about exploiting a system’s vulnerability. Session fixation allows attackers to fixate the session ID of another user. They carry out session fixation attacks through phishing attempts. Websites that accept session IDs without hindrance from URLs are ideal for a session fixation attack. 

A malicious attacker mails a link containing a specific session ID to a user they have targeted. The threat actor learns about the precise session ID that is in use once the targeted user clicks on the links and logs in to a site or web app. Then, the attacker can easily hijack cookies using the most advanced cookie hijacking tool.

Session Sniffing

Threat actors often use a packet sniffer for intercepting and logging packets during session sniffing. They do so to ensure packets can seamlessly flow across even a robust network connection. Session sniffing can let attackers find and steal session cookies.

A website is more vulnerable to session sniffing when the login pages only have SSL/TLS encryption. Even though threat actors cannot view your password, cookie or session hijacking is an effortless task for them if the rest of the pages of a website where you log in do not have SSL/TLS. They employ packet sniffing so as to monitor the traffic on the network, including session cookies.

Cross-Site Scripting

Attackers resort to cross-site scripting attacks to deceive a user’s system into injecting malicious code. Still, the machine believes that it is secure and safe as it considers that the code comes from a reliable server. The threat actors can easily steal cookies when the script begins to run. 

Exploiting the vulnerabilities of servers or applications is possible when attackers include client-side scripts smartly into web pages. It causes the web browser to carry out code execution once it starts loading the invaded web page. Malicious scripts are capable of retrieving a user’s session ID when the server has no http feature in session cookies. 

Prevent Session or Cookie Hijacking with Affitraps

Investing in Affitraps that Virus Positive Technologies designs and develops can successfully help in session hijacking prevention. This productive tool can track malicious attackers efficiently. It can quickly detect cookie stuffing that results from a website through immediate or direct re-direction.

One of the interesting things about this tool is its ability to crawl the input domains on various cloud agents to gather third-party trackers automatically and filter them in the most appropriate manner possible.