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Cross-Site Request Forgery occurrences in Spectrum Protect Operations Center
IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center 8.1.0.000 through 8.1.13.xxx is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery which could allow an attacker to execute malicious and unauthorized actions transmitted from a user that the website trusts. IBM X-Force ID: 220048. (2022-03-14, CVE-2022-22346)
IBM Spectrum Protect Operations Center 8.1.0.000 through 8.1.13.xxx is vulnerable to reverse tabnabbing where it could allow a page linked to from within Operations Center to rewrite it. An administrator could enter a link to a malicious URL that another administrator could then click. Once clicked, that malicious URL could then rewrite the original page with a phishing page. IBM X-Force ID: 220139. (2022-03-14, CVE-2022-22348)
Why Cross-Site Request Forgery can be dangerous
The absence of Anti-CSRF tokens may lead to a Cross-Site Request Forgery attack that can result in executing a specific application action as another logged in user, e.g. steal their account by changing their email and password or silently adding a new admin user account when executed from the administrator account.
The attacker may copy one of your web application forms, e.g. email/password change form.
The webpage will contain a form with the exact set of fields as the original application but with input values already provided and the submit button replaced with a Javascript code causing auto-submission. When the page is accessed the form will be immediately submitted and page contents replaced with a valid content or a redirect to your original application.
One of your application users who is already logged in can be then tricked to navigate to such malicious page e.g. by clicking a link in a phishing email, and the pre-populated form content will be submitted to your application like it would be submitted by your user.