The Social Media Security Podcast

The following post is a contribution from a researcher called “anti-social”:

A few years back MySpace implemented MSPLinks as a way to defeat spammers from posting their spam URL’s. The idea being that spammers couldn’t make money if they constantly had to buy new domains. The idea worked to a pretty good extent once MySpace finally figured out how to filter all the XSS vulnerabilites they had when sanitizing profiles.

About a year ago, MySpace added to MSPLinks a phishing warning screen to inform users that the site they were going to could possibly be malicious. This screen can be easily defeated by a simple post method with a hidden field. That’s because MSPLinks.com trusts post requests from MySpace.com.

A working example can be found at: http://www.myspace.com/socnetsec

If you click the 1st button under the “About Me” section, the phishing screen isn’t shown (IE and Safari takes you straight through to the link, Firefox pops up a warning asking if you want to post your data to MSPLinks)

If you click the 2nd button, you’ll notice that you’ll be taken to MySpace’s phishing window.

Here is the simple html code in the profile:

<form action="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LnNvY2lhbG1lZGlhc2VjdXJpdHkuY29t" method="POST">

<input type="submit" name="coolbutton" value="SETTING DISCHECK" />

<input type="hidden" name="discheck" value="on" />

</form>

<form action="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LnNvY2lhbG1lZGlhc2VjdXJpdHkuY29t" method="GET">

<input type="submit" name="coolbutton" value="NO DISCHECK" />

</form>

What’s the point?  Even with SPAM and URL filtering on social networks like MySpace…they can be easily bypassed.  Since 2007 there have been many different ways to bypass MSPLinks (just do a Google search), this is just another method.  Also, because social networks encourage user generated content, clicking on any links that are posted by the user can lead to bad things.  Especially if they are already masked like they are via MSPLinks.  MSPLinks have now become even more dangerous because you trust MySpace is filtering these links.

Hopefully, MySpace can come up with something better then MSPLinks as they are pretty much useless to fight SPAM and links to malware sites.