Researchers Get $10,000 for Hacking Google Server with Malicious XML
Apr 12, 2014
A critical vulnerability has been uncovered in Google that could allow an attacker to access the internal files of Google's production servers. Sounds ridiculous but has been proven by the security researchers from Detectify. The vulnerability resides in the Toolbar Button Gallery ( as shown ). The team of researchers found a loophole after they noticed that Google Toolbar Button Gallery allows users to customize their toolbars with new buttons. So, for the developers, it is easy to create their own buttons by uploading XML files containing metadata for styling and other such properties. This feature of Google search engine is vulnerable to XML External Entity (XXE) . It is an XML injection that allows an attacker to force a badly configured XML parser to " include " or " load " unwanted functionality that can compromise the security of a web application. " The root cause of XXE vulnerabilities is naive XML parsers that blindly interpret the DTD of t...
