AliExpress hacked – the entire story

Introduction

As you may have heard it was recently advertised that AliExpress, one of the world’s largest online shopping websites, was found to have substantial security shortcomings. As one of the people who discovered the vulnerability, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the vulnerability I detected in this blog post.

A few months ago, I purchased a few items from the AliExpress website. After the purchase, I sent a message to the seller in order to ask him a question regarding the items. From my experience as an application security expert in AppSec Labs, I had suspected that it might be vulnerable to a certain security breach, and so I started to investigate the issue locally and without, of course, harming the system or its users.

After a short investigation, I had concluded that any buyer in the website can browse to any item and can send a message to the seller using the “Contact Now” feature; this feature can be abused by a malicious buyer who could send a message to the seller containing a malicious payload.
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