Cross-site request forgery

Cross-site request forgery, also known as one-click attack or session riding and abbreviated as CSRF (sometimes pronounced sea-surf) or XSRF, is a type of malicious exploit of a website where unauthorized commands are transmitted from a user that the website trusts. Unlike cross-site scripting (XSS), which exploits the trust a user has for a particular site, CSRF exploits the trust that a site has in a user's browser.

History

CSRF vulnerabilities have been known and in some cases exploited since 2001. Because it is carried out from the user's IP address, some website logs might not have evidence of CSRF. Exploits are under-reported, at least publicly, and as of 2007 there are few well-documented examples. The online banking webapplication of ING Direct was vulnerable for a CSRF attack that allowed illicit money transfers. Popular video website YouTube was also vulnerable to CSRF in 2008 and this allowed any attacker to perform nearly all actions of any user. Customers of a bank in Mexico were attacked in early 2008 with an image tag in email. The link in the image tag changed the DNS entry for the bank in their ADSL router to point to a malicious website impersonating the bank.McAfee was also vulnerable to CSRF and it allowed attackers to change their company system.