CISSP Exam Note (Domain 2: Telecommunications and Networking Security) – Session Hijacking

December 11, 2009 · Posted in Information Security, Information Systems · Comment 

In computer science, session hijacking refers to the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many web sites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim’s computer (see HTTP cookie theft).

TCP session hijacking is when a hacker takes over a TCP session between two machines. Since most authentication only occurs at the start of a TCP session, this allows the hacker to gain access to a machine. Read more

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