Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cloud Security

Stored XSS Vulnerability on iCloud.com Earned Researcher $5,000

A bug bounty hunter claims he has earned a $5,000 reward from Apple for reporting a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on iCloud.com.

A bug bounty hunter claims he has earned a $5,000 reward from Apple for reporting a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on iCloud.com.

Vishal Bharad, a researcher and penetration tester from India, published a blog post earlier this week describing his findings. Bharad said he had attempted to find cross-site request forgery (CSRF), insecure direct object reference (IDOR), logic bugs and other types of issues on Apple’s icloud.com website, but ultimately ended up discovering a stored XSS flaw.

The vulnerability was present in the iCloud-hosted versions of Apple’s Pages and Keynote software. Exploitation involved creating a new document or presentation and entering an XSS payload into its name field.

The attacker would then need to share a link to the malicious document or presentation with the targeted user and convince them to access the “Browse All Versions” feature from the “Settings” menu. Once the victim would click on “Browse All Versions,” the attacker’s malicious payload got executed in their browser.

Bharad said he reported his findings to Apple in August 2020 and in October the tech giant informed him that the security hole had earned him $5,000.

The researcher has published a blog post detailing his findings, as well as a video showing how an attack worked.

XSS vulnerabilities can have a significant impact, which is why companies such as Google, Facebook and Tesla have paid out tens of thousands of dollars for these types of flaws.

Bug bounty platform HackerOne reported last year that its members had earned more than $4 million for XSS vulnerabilities.

Related: XSS Vulnerability Exposed Google Employees to Attacks

Related: JavaScript Library Introduced XSS Flaw in Google Search

Related: XSS Vulnerability Exploited in Tech Support Scam

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Cloud Security

Microsoft and Proofpoint are warning organizations that use cloud services about a recent consent phishing attack that abused Microsoft’s ‘verified publisher’ status.

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.