Netscape.com has been hacked via a persistent Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in their newly launched Digg-like news service.

It seems the attacker did report the flaw to them repeatedly but they didn’t heed and ignored it, so he performed the XSS all over the site.



eplawless stated the following:

It was me. I did it. C’est moi, etc. This was in response to my having reported the month and a half old vulnerability to Netscape over a week ago. They ignored me. I reported it again, multiple times; they continued to ignore. I posted a few stories on their site, which made it to the front page and were deleted. I made the decision, in response to the recent Rose/Calacanis debacle, to add a benign script to the site that everyone would see and recognize as a compromise of security because this vulnerability is serious and they were not taking it as such. They had this coming; this isn’t a juvenile prank, and is only marginally retaliation against Calacanis for being a twit. This is making sure their users don’t get hacked too.



The guy made use of a fairly simple XSS vulnerability to inject their own javascript code snippets into pages on the website, including the homepage. As of now, it has only been used to display javascript alerts with “comical” messages and to redirect visitors to Digg.com!

Luckily nothing malicious has been done and the users aren’t at risk, as far as we know anyhow..