Becoming the Hacker

CSRF

Earlier, I briefly mentioned that browsers will pass along all associated cookies to applications automatically. For example, if the user has authenticated to the http://email.site application, a session cookie will be created, which can be used to make authenticated requests. A CSRF attack takes advantage of this user experience feature to abuse overly-trusting applications.

It is common for applications to allow users to update their profile with custom values that are passed via GET or POST requests. The application will, of course, check to see whether the request is authenticated and perhaps even sanitize the input to prevent SQLi or XSS attacks.

Consider a scenario where we've tricked the victim into visiting a malicious site, or perhaps ...