In the “what took them so long?“ department ...
Dan Morrill does a nice summation of what’s dangerous about RSS and ATOM feeds.
Really, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody. I saw this coming ten years ago. Any time someone is pushing data to you, there’s the greater possibility that it will contain bad stuff. (Yes, some people can wait for you to pull it, but I suspect that most attackers want to initiate the transfer if they can.)
I think the only thing keeping this from being a worm vector is the fact that you can’t necessarily count on the recipient of an RSS bomb having anything in place to forward it on; one feed doesn’t necessarily go to another site with its own feed. I could see it being used to spread botnets, though. Compromise the site of a really popular blogger and you could hit a lot of people. (Come to think of it, I hope Bloglines takes its security seriously ...)
Okay, my fifteen-minute FUD break is over now. Back to work ...
Posted by shrdlu on Wednesday, April 11, 2007
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