Cross site scripting (also known as XSS) occurs when a web application gathers malicious
data from a user. The data is usually gathered in the form of a hyperlink which contains malicious
content within it. The user will most likely click on this link from another website, instant message,
or simply just reading a web board or email message. Usually the attacker will encode the
malicious portion of the link to the site in HEX (or other encoding methods) so the request is less
suspicious looking to the user when clicked on. After the data is collected by the web application,
it creates an output page for the user containing the malicious data that was originally sent to it,
but in a manner to make it appear as valid content from the website. Many popular guestbook and forum
programs allow users to submit posts with html and javascript embedded in them. If for example I
was logged in as "john" and read a message by "joe" that contained malicious javascript in it, then
it may be possible for "joe" to hijack my session just by reading his bulletin board post. Further
details on how attacks like this are accomplished via "cookie theft" are explained in detail below.
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