Clickjacking

Introduction

Clickjacking is a web security vulnerability where an attacker tricks a user into clicking something different from what they perceive. This is done by overlaying an invisible or disguised element on top of a legitimate webpage.

How it works:

An attacker embeds an invisible iframe of a target website within a malicious page.
The user thinks they are clicking on the visible page, but they are actually interacting with the hidden iframe.
This can lead to unwanted actions such as clicking on a hidden button, submitting a form, or activating a harmful feature.

Clickjacking attacks are not prevented by CSRF tokens, as the user’s session with the target site remains valid.

Example of Clickjacking

Here is a basic example of a clickjacking attack using an iframe:

<html>
    <head>
        <style>
            iframe {
                position:relative;
                width:$width_value;
                height: $height_value;
                opacity: $opacity;
                z-index: 2;
            }
            div {
                position: absolute;
                top: 185px;
                left: 90px;
                z-index: 1;
            }
        </style>
</head>
    <body>
        <div>You won $3,000</div>
        <iframe src="http://victim-site.com"></iframe>
    </body>
</html>

The opacity of the iframe is set to 0, making it invisible, while the z-index ensures that it is layered above the visible content.

Prefilled Form Input Attack

Some websites allow prepopulating form inputs via GET parameters. Attackers can exploit this to trick users into submitting forms with attacker-controlled values.

Example:

http://website.com/account?email=attacker@example.com

If the website autofills the email field, the victim might unknowingly submit the attacker’s email instead of their own.

Bypassing Frame Busting Scripts

A frame busting script is a JavaScript script used by a website to prevent itself from being loaded inside an iframe on another site.

However, attackers can bypass these protections using the sandbox attribute in HTML5:

<iframe id="victim_site" src="https://victim-site.com" sandbox="allow-forms"></iframe>

When this is set with the allow-forms or allow-scripts values and the allow-top-navigation value is omitted then the frame buster script can be neutralized as the iframe cannot check whether or not it is the top window.

Clickjacking + DOM XSS

An attacker can combine Clickjacking with Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) for more impact.

Steps:

Identify an XSS vulnerability on the target site.
Embed the vulnerable page inside an iframe.
Use clickjacking to make the victim click a malicious link that triggers the XSS.

This allows the attacker to execute JavaScript in the victim’s session, potentially leading to account takeover.

Multi-Step Clickjacking Attacks

Some attacks require multiple steps. This can be done by overlaying multiple iframes with staged interactions.