What You See is Not What You Copy

Tricking users into copying different commands from what is displayed on a web page…

OK, maybe I’m late to this party but I recently came across a very cool attack vector that I had not heard about until now. There’s an excellent write up on this here that was actually published in 2008, so I won’t go through the details of how this works. However you can view an interactive demo of this in action here.

Essentially, this is ruse that can be used to trick people into running a different command on their system than what they thought they had initially copied from a website. Go ahead and try it out over at JSFiddle.net, just copy the text within the “result” box and paste it into a text editor to review the full command. Neat, huh?!

The demo above shows an attempt to shovel a reverse python shell back to the attackers system though make it appear like the command simply echoed “this is a test” to the screen as expected. This proof of concept is demonstrated below.

This is merely another vector that can be leveraged in social engineering attacks. Demonstrating the risk with blindly copying + running commands from websites that you do not trust. Always re-type commands such as this or paste them into a text-editor prior to running them directly. Also, if you are cloning a repository from a resource such as GitHub, review the code before integrating this into your project. All too often websites are backdoored due to the themes or modules that have been downloaded and installed from an un-trusted repository without going through code-review. In general, you shouldn’t implicitly trust anything at face value; trust but verify.