Categories: Breaking NewsHacking

eBay promptly fixed a reflected file download vulnerability

EBay has recently fixed a reflected file download vulnerability discovered by the security researcher David Sopas at WebSegura.

Ebay is among the web services most targeted by cyber criminals and phishers, over the years, security experts have spotted an impressive amount of attack exploiting techniques more or less sophisticated. Almost every attack relies on social engineering, attackers trick victims into clicking on malicious links or to visit websites hosting any kind of exploit kits used to steal victim’s credentials.

ebay RFDebay RFD

Security researcher David Sopas at WebSegura discovered a reflected file download vulnerability and reported it to eBay in March. Sopas is a known expert that in the past discovered similar flaw affecting GitHub, Facebook and Instagram. The company promptly solved the problem and releases a fix a few days ago.

What if malicious users could improve their phishing campaigns on eBay? What if malicious pages linked eBay to download malicious files and infect users?” Sopas wrote in an advisory that is temporary not available.

“When using eBay and inspecting it’s requests I noticed a call to a JSON file that made me wonder a bit about a security vulnerability – Reflected Filename Download.”

The company promptly solved the problem and released a fix a few days ago. The eBay website was affected by a reflected file download vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to trick victims into believing that they were downloading a file from the legitimate website. Sopas explained some browsers, including Internet Explorer 8 and 9, allow the attack by simply visiting a malicious URL, meanwhile other browsers make possible the exploitation of the flaw only by forcing the user to download the file.

The exploitation of the flaw in the eBay domain allow attackers to gain control of the victim’s PC, the user in fact, have no perception of the attack because from their perspective a harmless file is downloaded from the legitimate eBay website. 

“Pretty easy to implement but not easy to find. RFD attacks are still very common and many companies are not aware of it’s real danger,” said Sopas, which connfirmend also that the attack is quite easy to carry out. “The victim always thinks that the source file is on the trusted site.”

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – eBay, reflected file download vulnerability)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

Shields up US retailers. Scattered Spider threat actors can target them

Google warns that the cybercrime group Scattered Spider behind UK retailer attacks is now targeting…

3 hours ago

U.S. CISA adds Google Chromium, DrayTek routers, and SAP NetWeaver flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog<gwmw style="display:none;"></gwmw>

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Google Chromium, DrayTek routers, and SAP NetWeaver…

8 hours ago

Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 Day Two: researcher earned 150K hacking VMware ESXi

On day two of Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, participants earned $435,000 for demonstrating zero-day in SharePoint,…

20 hours ago

New botnet HTTPBot targets gaming and tech industries with surgical attacks

New botnet HTTPBot is targeting China's gaming, tech, and education sectors, cybersecurity researchers warn. NSFOCUS …

21 hours ago

Meta plans to train AI on EU user data from May 27 without consent

Meta plans to train AI on EU user data from May 27 without consent; privacy…

1 day ago

AI in the Cloud: The Rising Tide of Security and Privacy Risks

Over half of firms adopted AI in 2024, but cloud tools like Azure OpenAI raise…

1 day ago