The only way to improve the situation is for site operators to undertake more comprehensive efforts to rid their pages of the problems, said Hoffman, and for them to slow down adoption of newer languages, such as AJAX, which appear to outstrip many Web developers' security skills.
"There's nothing you can do as an end-user. Ultimately these are things that are wrong with the sites; [the attacks] are not exploiting the browser. JavaScript is supposed to execute in the browser," Hoffman said. "We need to pressure the people who are responsible for the sites -- but Google, Amazon, and Yahoo are already putting lots of money into this and they still can't fix the problem."
One of the newer wrinkles of AJAX-based attacks is the ability to create XSS threats that are self-propagating, according to Hoffman. Whereas the threats were traditionally designed to sit on only one URL and infect people who visited its location, the attacks can now be linked to Web crawling tools to find other pages that may be exploitable, specifically other sites within the same online domains.
Using such an approach, an attacker could infiltrate businesses' corporate intranets via their public Web sites and gain access to sensitive organizational data, Hoffman said.
Hoffman also demonstrated a new Web-based vulnerability scanning tool he has designed and dubbed Jikto, which uses AJAX to crawl Web sites and online applications for holes, and can be dropped into other people's browsers to use them as unknowing sources for gathering such information.
The SPI researcher said he created the tool to illustrate just how easily hackers can begin using combinations of JavaScript, AJAX, and other Web technologies such as Flash, to carry out attacks and make their work even more potent,
"We're finding that in the last year ... what you can do with JavaScript execution has drastically increased. People need to understand how severe these vulnerabilities are," Hoffman said. "It would be a tragedy for developers to overlook these issues because they're simply unaware of all the bad things that can be done; we're trying to change the direction in the software development and security industries about their understanding of how devastating the implications can be."
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