Adding extra spaces to an existing account name during registration

Jan 25, 2014 08:55 GMT  ·  By

A security researcher has found a way to hijack Samsung.com accounts. Fortunately, Samsung has addressed the vulnerability identified by the expert to prevent account takeovers.

The expert who discovered the issue is Matthew Bryant. He has found that an attacker can register an account on Samsung.com by using an existent account name and adding extra spaces at the end.

This is registered as a separate account, but if the user who owns this account goes to another subdomain, such as shop.us.samsung.com, the spaces from the end of the username are removed.

This means that the attacker can hijack the account of the user who had registered the name without the spaces. Well, this is how an attack worked before Samsung fixed the vulnerability.

For example, if a hacker registered an account with "[email protected]<SPACE><SPACE>", he could gain access to the "[email protected]" account when visiting shops.us.samsung.com.

Bryant has published a proof-of-concept video to demonstrate his findings.