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Quick Summary: A clickjacking attack tricks victims into clicking malicious elements on a website, resulting in compromised data and security. It can be a critical security risk if it remains unaddressed. Learn everything about clickjacking, its techniques, and prevention tips to mitigate the potential risk in this blog.
Cybersecurity is a pressing concern for every organization due to the high costs of data breaches standing at $4.88 billion presently as per statistics. Understanding different types of cybersecurity threats and their potential risks is a helpful step in protecting your data and applications.
Clickjacking is one of the most challenging security threats that require attention. Understanding what clickjacking is, how it works, and ways to prevent it can help security teams protect digital assets from attackers. You can learn everything about Clickjacking in this article to mitigate the risks.
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Table of Contents
- An Overview of Clickjacking
- Understanding How Clickjacking Works
- Different Techniques of Clickjacking Attack
- How to Prevent Clickjacking Attack?
- To Wrap Up
An Overview of Clickjacking
Clickjacking is a dubious method that involves tricking users into clicking a fake webpage element that is disguised as another element or invisible. There are lots of websites on the internet today that have invisible links or elements that appear something else, but in reality, they aren’t what they appear.
Just imagine that you visit a website full of ads and popups. There is an image or button that has an attractive offer or message, you click it but unwittingly visit a malicious site, download malware, or reveal your credentials.
This is how a victim falls prey to clickjacking. However, clickjacking doesn’t only occur when visiting a susceptible website; it can also take place through emails. An attacker can send misleading emails to a victim that seem to be from a trusted source with clickjacking elements.
Understanding the Mechanism of Clickjacking Attack
Clickjacking attacks are dangerous for victims as they pose threats to their data or identity. Besides, this attack can also allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a victim’s account through session hijacking. The attack works by luring victims into clicking malicious links.
Creating a Demo Site
An attacker creates a malicious site and includes an iframe in it. The iframe will hold a legitimate website in it. The attacker can use styling to make the iframe invisible and overlay the dummy website. Besides, the attacker places the button on the legit website on top of the button of the demo site. Now, it’s clear what happens if a victim clicks on the button and visits an unintended website.
Encouraging Victims to Visit the Site
Attackers often use social engineering to entice victims into visiting their sites. It includes sending fake emails. These emails include messages like a lottery win, irresistible offers, and other enticing messages.
Perform Unintended Actions
Once an attacker is successful in enticing a victim into clicking a link to a fake offer or prize, it results in unintended actions. It leads to downloading malware, revealing credentials, or compromising sensitive data like credit cards, account information, etc.
What are the Different Techniques of Clickjacking Attack?
There are different types of techniques attackers use to launch clickjacking attacks. The following are the key techniques used today.
Hidden Overlay
In this technique, an attacker uses a tiny iframe that can be placed under the mouse cursor. It is quite small and could be 1x1 pixel in size. It is not visible to the victim; when clicked, he/she is redirected to a malicious web page. As a result, the victim could lose sensitive data or load malicious software.
Cropping
In this technique of clickjacking, an attacker overlays only a few elements of a legitimate web page with malicious page elements. For example, the attacker can replace the text of a button with another language, change hyperlinks to redirect to malicious pages, or modify content with misleading information.
Scrolling
In this technique of clickjacking, an attacker will create a genuine pop-up or dialog box containing a button slightly off the screen. The pop-up or dialog box seems innocuous, but the button redirects a victim to a malicious web page. However, this technique may not work if the victim has a pop-up blocker or ad-blocker.
Drag and Drop
This is a kind of clickjacking technique that goes beyond clicking. In this technique, victims have to perform additional actions like filling out forms. This seems a legitimate process, but the attacker captures the information once a victim fills out the form, resulting in data compromises. The attacker aims to get sensitive information from victims without their knowledge.
Fully Transparent Overlay
It is the most used clickjacking technique. In this method, an attacker covers a malicious page with a legitimate page. So, the attacker tries to disguise the malicious page as a legitimate one. But when a victim clicks on a webpage element, the malicious page loads underneath.
The attacker creates an invisible iframe for this where the legitimate page is loaded. The victim doesn’t have an idea that there is a malicious page underneath and loses sensitive information.
Repositioning
It is a rapid content replacement attack. In this type of attack tactic, an attacker can quickly move the UI elements while a user’s attention is on other portions of the web page. Repositioning aims to lure victims into clicking this moving element instead of allowing the user to scroll, read, or click something else on the web page.
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How to Prevent Clickjacking Attack?
Clickjacking seems innocuous, but it is dangerous in reality. It can allow attackers to steal sensitive data like credit card information, bank details, PIIs, etc. So, preventing this threat vector is crucial to protect your data. The following are some ways to protect your clickjacking.
Prevent Framing
You can implement a policy to prevent the republishing or reframing of a website’s content on any other website or inside an HTML container. This policy is known as CSP (Content Security Policy) and works as a primary defense against clickjacking attacks. Once CSP is implemented, it will permit only specific resources like CSS and JavaScript, which are applicable to the client browser.
This method can prevent clickjacking by minimizing the possibility of inserting content into a web page. It can prevent the attacker from tampering with a web page’s content.
Use SAMEORIGIN for X-Frame-Options
This is included in the header of a webpage and enables a browser to determine whether a web page can be rendered in a frame or not. With this method, you can help prevent attackers from forcing browsers to render your web page in HTML elements like <iframe>, <frame>, <object>, or <embed>.
X-Frame-Options has two directives: “DENY” and “SAMEORIGIN” that enable you to control the rendering of your web pages on other web pages. Use the “SAMEORIGIN” directive to prevent clickjacking attacks, as it ensures that the contents of your web pages are not embedded into any other site.
Use a Framebuster
Website framing is the real cause of clickjacking. Attackers can frame your website on another website to achieve their malicious agenda. Hence, it is one of the key web application security threats posing challenges in front of organizations. You can benefit from a preventive technique like restricting the website’s framing capabilities. You can leverage frame-breaking scripts or frame-busting via the web browser to ensure client-side protection.
Check Clickjacking Vulnerability
Another method for clickjacking prevention is conducting a security assessment to discover respective vulnerabilities. By discovering and remediating clickjacking vulnerability, you can mitigate this risk and prevent attackers from gaining unauthorized access to your content. It is a robust technique for protecting your web application against potential cybersecurity risks.
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To Wrap Up
Clickjacking is a notorious tactic used by attackers to defraud victims. It can result in credential theft, session hijacking, identity theft, and other types of security risks. Hence, preventing clickjacking is essential to protect sensitive data and restrict attackers from achieving their malicious objectives.
Vulnerability assessment is a crucial step in this regard that involves identifying and remediating security flaws. You need a robust DAST tool like ZeroThreat to assess your web applications for security flaws and minimize the risks.
ZeroThreat identifies critical security risks accurately, helping you discover potential threats before they pose a serious challenge. Check it out for free to see its benefits and how it helps in minimizing security risks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the most common clickjacking attack type?
Overlay attacks are the most common type of clickjacking attack that is usually created with invisible iframes. In this type, an attacker covers a website that seems legitimate with imperceivable interfaces that victims cannot see. As a result, when the victim clicks on such an interface, he/she is redirected to a malicious page that steals information or loads malware.