Hack From Home Monday

• robert
• July 1st, 2008
• 02:28:31 AM

For those of you that do not know, Brightmix is located in Omaha, Nebraska. Well, on Friday around 5:00 as we were right about to pack up for a nice quite weekend, something bad happened. A massive storm invaded the city of Omaha.

During the 10 minutes duration of the storm, winds grew upwards of 100 MPH, massive hail was launched everywhere, the power went out all across the city, homes were destroyed. And, worst of all… The Brightmix internet went down.

After the storm passed we all made our way back home through the flooded streets… Thinking that the power and internet would be back on Monday. But, we were wrong, so very wrong. It is now Monday and still 24,000 places lack the glory and wonder that is… Power.

Brightmix is one of these 24,000 places. Despite that we are all wired up with MacBook Pro’s (That have a battery), no power at the office means… No internet!

Although most of my internet traffic is to localhost, I still like visiting other websites.

Because of this, Dusty proclaimed today would officially be Hack From Home Monday!

Despite that I hacked quite a bit at home, I was not quite as productive as I could have been because the glorious Hacking Lights are back at Brightmix, without power

I spent the day finishing up a task I had been working on since last Tuesday! Well, that task is now done and I can move on to the next one!

But upon completing this task, I have noticed there are a lot of websites that do not properly check their forms for valid inputs.

Sure, they check for SQL Injections, but they do not check to make sure the requests themselves are valid.

For example, I can search for “*” in a search box… And it returns all indexed pages on their website. Another example is if they have a drop down box in a form, they assume since the drop down box was created with valid data, that valid data is what they will get back after the form is submitted.

Well, I have a addon to my Firefox called Tamper Data that allows me to set that drop down box to whatever I want. This creates interesting results when they do not have a check to make sure it is valid still.

The point of this is, there are a lot of websites that do not check that data is correct, and they really should!