Clickjacking

19th May 2021 | Cybrary

Clickjacking, also known as a “UI Redress Attack”, is when an attacker uses multiple transparent or vague layers to trick a user into clicking on a button or link on another page when they were intending to click on the top-level page. Thus, the attacker is “hijacking” clicks meant for their page and routing them to another page, most likely owned by another application, domain, or both.

Using a similar technique, keystrokes can also be hijacked. With a carefully crafted combination of stylesheets, iframes, and text boxes, a user can be led to believe they are typing in the password to their email or bank account, but are instead typing into an invisible frame controlled by the attacker.

One of the most famous examples of Clickjacking was an attack against the Adobe Flash plugin settings page. By loading this page into an invisible iframe, an attacker could trick a user into altering the security settings of Flash, giving permission for any Flash animation to utilize the computer’s microphone and camera.

What does this mean for an SMB?

While it may be difficult for the typical SMB Owner to take actions to prevent this from occurring, there are some things your IT staff can help you set up. According to OWASP, there are three main strategies that can be used to defend against these attacks:

Preventing the browser from loading the page in the frame using the X-Frame-Options or Content Security Policy (frame-ancestors) HTTP headers.
Preventing session cookies from being included when the page is loaded in a frame using the SameSite cookie attribute.
Implementing JavaScript code in the page to attempt to prevent it from being loaded in a frame.

Note that these mechanisms are all independent of each other, and where possible more than one of them should be implemented in order to provide defense in depth. In addition to these actions, these basic measures should be in place to secure your users:

Adopt two-factor authentication to prevent a password breach of your business’s VPN, email services, and any other critical service that is directly Internet accessible
Adopt a password manager to use personally and professionally to improve password hygiene (while housing unique 14+ character password/passphrases)
Regularly backup data following the 3-2-1 backup method for backing up all your critical and sensitive data
Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks – the primary way cyberattacks occur
Test employees on their training to validate they can spot and delete threats rather than click and succumb to an attack