What is SSL Hijacking Attack and How to Prevent It?

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Imagine two phone lines connecting you and a website separately, acting as a go-between. Sounds sneaky, right? Because it is. An attacker can see and even change your sensitive data by using SSL hijacking to falsely maintain a secure connection. This deceptive tactic poses a threat to your online data security.

As you continue to explore, you will unravel the secret tricks behind SSL hijacking attacks , as well as the mechanisms for detecting and protecting against such intrusions.

Table of contents

What is SSL Hijacking?
How does SSL Hijacking work?
Examples of SSL Hijacking Attacks
How to detect SSL Hijacking?
How to prevent SSL hijacking?
What is SSL Hijacking?
SSL Hijacking is a cyber attack in which an attacker intercepts the communication between a client and a server. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol that ensures secure transactions between web servers and browsers. Hijacking, on the other hand, involves taking control without permission.

Now imagine that you send a secret message in a coded mobile app development service language. You think it's safe because only the recipient knows the code. But what if someone else intercepts your message and decrypts it? That's what happens when SSL is hijacked. The attacker breaks into the communication channel, decrypts your message, and gains unauthorized access to your sensitive data.

SSL hijacking is a serious vulnerability in today's digital age. Your credit card information, login credentials, or personal data could be at risk. SSL hijacking could also allow an attacker to manipulate your actions on the site, which could have dire consequences.




How does SSL Hijacking work?
SSL hijacking begins when you attempt to establish a secure connection to a website. The hijacker intercepts the connection and creates two separate connections – one between you and the hijacker, and another between the hijacker and the site. This interference is known as a man-in-the-middle attack .

SSL hijacking refers to a variety of techniques including stealing cookies or session IDs, exploiting vulnerabilities in SSL/TLS implementations such as protocol downgrades, and manipulating certificate validation processes to gain unauthorized access or intercept secure connections.

One of the standard methods used in SSL hijacking is through rogue SSL certificates. When you connect to a website over HTTPS , your browser checks the SSL certificate to ensure that it comes from a trusted certificate authority (CA) and matches the domain you are visiting. However, in a hijacking scenario, the attacker presents your browser with a fake SSL certificate, pretending it is from a legitimate site.

To make this deception convincing, attackers often use techniques such as DNS spoofing or ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) poisoning to redirect your traffic to a server under their control. Once your browser accepts the fake certificate, it establishes a secure connection to the attacker's server, believing it to be a legitimate website.

From here, an attacker can decrypt and view the traffic between you and their server. They can also manipulate the data in transit by injecting malicious code or changing the content without your knowledge.

You may think your connection is secure because you see a padlock icon in your browser. But that padlock only means that the connection is encrypted . So you are communicating securely with the hijacker, not the website.

Now the hijacker can see everything you send, including sensitive information like passwords and credit card numbers. They can also change the data you send or receive. This is how SSL hijacking works, and why it is such a dangerous threat.