Session hijacking

Exploitation of a valid computer session

In computer science, session hijacking, sometimes also known as cookie hijacking, is the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many websites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim's computer. After successfully stealing appropriate session cookies an adversary might use the Pass the Cookie technique to perform session hijacking. Cookie hijacking is commonly used against client authentication on the internet. Modern web browsers use cookie protection mechanisms to protect the web from being attacked.

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