Pros And Cons Of Session Hijacking

Session Hijacking: Introduction and measures to safeguard

In this age of digital era, everything happens over the net from business to shopping, from banking to education; as the internet grows wider, we are witnessing a growth in Cyber threats and attacks.

Every web user demands a basic need to be assured that their data, money, or communications are safe and trustworthy. So security plays a prominent role in each facet of digital communication or transaction that happens over the web.

There are numerous security threats that occur on the net starting from man-in-middle attack, Denial-of-Service attack, IP spoofing etc., thus it becomes a tedious task for each system administrator and information security professionals to be competent enough

The techniques used could be installing Trojans on client PC's, Sniffing network traffic, HTTP referrer header and cross-site scripting attacks.

Calculating: The attacker tries to predict the valid session ID using non-randomly generated IDs. The number of attempts that is required for retrieving the valid session ID depends on the key space of session ID.

Spoofing VS Hijacking

Many times, spoofing and hijacking are considered to be a similar issue. Actually, they're entirely different from each other.

Spoofing: A hacker can impersonate himself to gain access. unlike hijacking, it actually creates a new session using target stolen credentials instead of using existing session.

Hijacking: In contrast to spoofing, Hijacking takes over existing active session. it will depend upon some legitimate user for authentication and establish a valid connection. Types of Session Hijacking

Depending on the degree of involvement by the attacker, Session hijacking can be either active or passive in nature

A passive attack uses sniffers on the network allowing attackers to gather information, The attacker will later use this data to log on as a legitimate user and take over privileges. Password sniffing is the simplest attack which will be performed once raw access to a network is

Session hijacking could be a serious threat to network and web applications as most of the systems are compromised because of insecure handling, weak session IDs and mostly no account lockout implementations. Although above explanation and countermeasures can offer the insight to safeguard the Organizations network, They should also be pen-tested and monitored continuously in order to make them impenetrable by the