How Hackers Use Blind XSS to Secretly Take Over Your Session!

Session Hijacking
Modern web applications utilize cookies to maintain a user’s session throughout different browsing sessions. This enables the user to only log in once and keep their logged-in session alive even if they visit the same website at another time or date. However, if a malicious user obtains the cookie data from the victim’s browser, they may be able to gain logged-in access with the victim’s user without knowing their credentials.

With the ability to execute JavaScript code on the victim’s browser, we may be able to collect their cookies and send them to our server to hijack their logged-in session by performing a Session Hijacking (aka Cookie Stealing) attack.

Blind XSS Detection
We usually start XSS attacks by trying to discover if and where an XSS vulnerability exists. However, in this exercise, we will be dealing with a Blind XSS vulnerability. A Blind XSS vulnerability occurs when the vulnerability is triggered on a page we don’t have access to.

Question – identify the vulnerable input field and find a working XSS payload, and then use the ‘Session Hijacking’ scripts to grab the Admin’s cookie and use it in ‘login.php’ to get the flag.