A new type of cross-site scripting (XSS) attack that exploits commonly used network administration tools could be putting users' data at risk, a researcher says.

Tyler Reguly, lead security research engineer at nCircle, today published a white paper outlining a new category of attack called "meta-information XSS" (miXSS), which works differently than other forms of the popular attack method -- and could be difficult to detect.

"Think about those network administration utilities that so many webmasters and SMB administrators rely on -- tools that perform a whois lookup, resolve DNS records, or simply query the headers of a Web server," the white paper states. "They're taking the meta-information provided by various services and displaying it within the rendered Website.

"These Web-based services introduce a class of XSS that can't be captured by the current categories."

Reguly explains that there are three current types of XSS attacks: reflected, persistent, and DOM-based.

"Reflected XSS refers to an attack that occurs when user input is reflected back at the user," he writes. "This means that you provide the malicious data as user input, and the Web application simply echoes the data back to you.

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