Details of the LiveJournal Account Hacks

An anonymous reader writes "Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has written about the recent spate of hijackings at Six Apart's popular LiveJournal service. Hundreds of journals have now been taken over by a notorious group called 'Bantown' using a series of complicated cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. Krebs details the recent security changes made by LiveJournal in response to the takeovers." From the article: "It is unclear whether LiveJournal has managed to close the security holes that the hackers claim to have used. The company says it has, but the hackers insist there are still at least 16 other similar JavaScript flaws on the LiveJournal site that could be used conduct the same attack. [Bantown] group members said they plan to turn their attention to looking for similar flaws at another large social-networking site. "

Comments

Wake up call

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a wake up call to people who use these services... sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, all have fancy features that do things that "users want", but at the expense of security because users don't think of/realize/care about security unless it actually results in a successful hack against them. Those who have hacked LJs might want to consider running their blog using plain text instead of all that wacky Javascript (not exactly necessary for something as basic as text on a web page). Ya get what you pay for... I'd be pretty choked if I was a LJ user who paid for a membership and had my pages all highjacked beyond repair, though...

Is Six Apart able to deal with this properly?

[mpontes]

I've been following this lately, and Six Apart's behaviour on this situation seems quite lacking. If what the article says is true and bantown have been just stealing cookies, the only measure they took, a recent change in LJ's subdomain policy seems quite pointless, since cookies are binded to .livejournal.com, anyway.

They also don't tell us which browser is affected on the newspost. How can we be safe if we are not informed? Can Six Apart actually deal with this in a professional way? I've been noticing LiveJournal is really slow and it hangs a lot lately. It seems that they know nothing about security and are just randomly mashing buttons in a attempt to hit the nail in the head.

Is Six Apart that incompetent that they can't prevent such attacks after they have been going for days, or is this bantown group really that good?

Details are scarce.

[Peganthyrus]

It would've been nice if LJ's news post on starting to fix this vulnerability had said which "popular browser" was affected.

Also, I somehow find myself suspecting that the anonymous person calling this 'Bantown' group 'notorious' is probably a member of it.

Details are scarce; all I could find in the LJ_Dev community relating to this wasone post about the effects of the first phase of the fix. Especially check Brad's comments.

And now,

[Council]

Cue the 500 posts about "haha, sucks for those Livejournal-using emo fucks" which help (a) put me off of Slashdot for a few days, and (b) obscure the actual information about how I should secure my account or what vulnerabilities these break-ins made use of.

I'm taking a deep breath and trying not to get in an argument with the "Livejournal is stupid" crap that will get modded funny. Just be aware that it gets on the nerves of those of us who use it, and there will inevitably be posts by people defending LJ, and then ridiculous anti-LJ evangelizing posts (as if anyone commenting on Slashdot doesn't know their way around blogs).

If you're posting anti-LJ jokes, please try to make them funny. And if you see useful information about the exploits, mod it up.