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We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

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Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#71
post #5

The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…

It's wild how often we rediscover that executing untrusted code leads to decades of whack-a-mole security. Excel/Word plus macros, HTML plus JavaScript, SVG plus JavaScript, ...

It’s wild how often specs are ok for 9 versions, and then at version 10, standard bodies decide to transform them into a trojan firehose.

It’s so regular like clockwork that it has to be a nation state doing this to us.

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#73
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody in SFBA-style software development, both pre- and post-LLM, is really resilient against these kinds of attacks. The problem isn't vibe coding so much as it is multiparty DLL-hell dependency stacks, which is something I attribute more to Javascript culture than to any recent advance in technology.

You're right that it's a specific programming culture that is especially vulnerable to it. And for the same reasons they were vulnerable to the same thing to a lesser degree before the rise of LLMs. But like, this case isn't really a dependency or supply chain attack. It's just allowing remote code execution because, idk, the dev who implemented it didn't read the manual and see that MDX can execute arbitrary code or…

One might consider this a supply chain attack because the title of the post is “We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack”

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#74
post #5

The fact that SVG files can contain scripts was a bit of a mistake. On one hand, the animations and entire interactive demos and even games in a single SVG are cool. But on the other hand, it opens up a serious can of worms of security vulnerabilities. As a result, SVG files are often banned from various image upload tools, they do not unfurl previews, and so on. If you upload an SVG to discord, it just shows the raw…

Could there be a limited format that disables scripting? Like in Excel: xlsx files have no macros, but xlsm (and the old xls) can contain macros.

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#76

This feels so emblematic of our current era. VC funded vibe coded AI documentation startup somehow gets big name customers who don't properly vet the security of the platform, ship a massive vulnerability that could pwn millions of users and the person who reports the vulnerability gets...$5k. If I recall last week Mintlify wrote a blog post showcasing their impressive(ly complicated) caching architecture. Pretending…

I'm curious what caching architecture a docs site needs, it can't be more complicated than a standard fare CDN?

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#77

I struggle to understand the issue .. could someone help me out ? Ok, you got " https://discord.com/_mintlify/_static/hackerone-a00f3c6c/lma... " to send a controlled payload But regular users will never hit " https://discord.com/_mintlify/_static/hackerone-a00f3c6c/lma... ", so they will never execute your script I fail to understand how this can be exploited, by whom and in what conditions

You have control over what displays on a page with a discord.com domain, you could manipulate the dom to have a login or something else and have it pass the data to your servers. A user would just see a link from discord.com

Yeah, this one must be socially engineered-- but a (fake) login page when accessing a docs site would fool most people.

Thankfully the browser prevents sending the cookies cross origin or else this is just a single click exploit.

Edit: I gave too much credit to Discord here. They aren't protecting their tokens correctly.

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#78
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is: PDF. You may not like it or adobe, but its there and widely supported.

PDF also has script support unfortunately.

That's apparently how 4chan got hacked a while back. They were letting users upload PDFs and were using ghostscript to generate thumbnails. From what I understand, the hackers uploaded a PDF which contained PostScript which exploited a ghostscript bug.

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#79
The linked site https://heartbreak.ing/ explains that Mintlify disabled CORS, so that 3rd party sites can run code in your Mintlify-using environment (X, Vercel, etc).

The OP site says that .svg files can only run scripts if they are directly opened, not via tags.

So how does the attack work?

Re: We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack

#80
post #72

One of these days I'm gonna have to learn why cross-site scripting even matters, especially with modern browsers restricting a script's access to anything local

If I can run my own code but in your context, I can pull in malicious scripts.

With those (all these are "possible" but not always, as usual, it depends, and random off the top of my head):

- I can redirect you to sites I control where I may be able to capture your login credentials.

- May be able to prompt and get you to download malware or virus payloads and run them locally.

- Can deface the site you are on, either leading to reputational harm for that brand, or leading you to think you're doing one thing when you're actually doing another.

- I may be able to exfiltrate your cookies and auth tokens for that site and potentially act as you.

- I might be able to pivot to other connected sites that use that site's authentication.

- I can prompt, as the site, for escalated access, and you may grant it because you trust that site, thereby potentially gaining access to your machine (it's not that the browsers fully restrict local access, they just require permission).

- Other social engineering attacks, trying to trick you into doing something that grants me more access, information, etc.

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