If
you are a newbie and don't know about cookie, then for your
information, Cookie is a piece of text stored on user computer by
websites visited by the user. This stored cookie is used by webserver
to identify and authenticate the user. So, if you steal this cookie
(which is stored in victim browser) and inject this stealed cookie in
your browser, you can imitate victim identity to webserver and enter
his Email account easily. This is called Session Hijacking. Thus, you
can easily hack Email account using such Cookie stealing hacks.
Tools needed for Cookie stealing attack:
Cookie stealing attack requires two types of tools:
1. Cookie capturing tool
2. Cookie injecting/editing tool
1. Cookie capturing tool:
Suppose,
you are running your computer on a LAN. The victim too runs on same
LAN. Then, you can use Cookie capturing tool to sniff all the packets
to and from victim computer. Some of the packets contain cookie
information. These packets can be decoded using Cookie capturing tool
and you can easily obtain cookie information necessary to hack Email
account. Wireshark and HTTP Debugger Pro softwares can be used to
capture cookies.
Update: Check out my
Wireshark tutorial for more information on cookie capturing tool.
2. Cookie injecting/editing tool:Now,
once you have successfully captured your victim cookies, you have
inject those cookies in your browser. This job is done using Cookie
injecting tool. Also, in certain cases after injection, you need to
edit cookies which can be done by Cookie editing tool. This cookie
injection/editing can be done using simple Firefox addons
Add N Edit Cookies and Greasemonkey scripts. I will write more on these two tools in my future articles.
Update: Check out my article
How to hack Gmail account by Cookie stealing for more information on Cookie injecting tool.
Drawbacks of Cookie Stealing:
Cookie Stealing is neglected because it has some serious drawbacks:
1.
Cookie has an expiry time i.e. after certain trigger cookie expires and
you cannot use it to hijack victim session. Cookie expiry is
implemented in two ways:
a. By assigning specific timestamp(helpful for us).
b.
By checking for triggers like user exiting from webbrowser. So, in such
cases, whenever user exits from his browser, his cookie expires and our
captured cookie becomes useless.
2. Cookie stealing becomes
useless in SSL encrypted environment i.e. for https (Secure HTTP)
links. But, most Email accounts and social networking sites rarely use
https unless vicitm has manually set https as mandatory connection type.
3.
Also, most cookies expire once victim hits on LogOut button. So, you
have to implement this Cookie stealing hack while user is logged in.
But, I think this is not such a serious drawback because most of us
have the habit of checking "Remember Me". So, very few people actually
log out of their accounts on their PCs.
Enjoy Cookie stealing trick to hack Email account...