Firesheep a Firefox addon has recently become very popular for easily carrying out a HTTP session hijacking attack. Http session hijacking attack can't be considered as a very sophisticated attack but needs some technical knowlegde to be performed . But Firesheep makes the attack a child's play. Firesheep was developed by Eric butler for Firefox, it was released at Toorcon 12 to demonstrate how serious cookie stealing can be.
Now lets understand how Firesheep actually works. When you provide your username and password in login forms of different website and submit it, the browser first encrypts the password and then sends it over the network. The corresponding website compares the information against its internal database and if they match, it sends a cookie(a small text file) to your browser. The browser saves this cookie and uses it to authenticate the user on the website every time the user opens a different page of the website. When the user logs out of his account the browser just deletes the cookie. Now the problem is that this cookies are not encrypted before sending over the network, due to this a hacker can capture this cookies and using them authenticate himself as the user from whom the cookie was stolen.
Now lets see how to use Firesheep.
Now lets understand how Firesheep actually works. When you provide your username and password in login forms of different website and submit it, the browser first encrypts the password and then sends it over the network. The corresponding website compares the information against its internal database and if they match, it sends a cookie(a small text file) to your browser. The browser saves this cookie and uses it to authenticate the user on the website every time the user opens a different page of the website. When the user logs out of his account the browser just deletes the cookie. Now the problem is that this cookies are not encrypted before sending over the network, due to this a hacker can capture this cookies and using them authenticate himself as the user from whom the cookie was stolen.
Now lets see how to use Firesheep.