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    The Spanner
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    Made by Gareth Heyes
    Follow me on Twitter: @garethheyes

    Javascript for hackers!

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    Firefox applet fun

    By Gareth Heyes (@hackvertor)

    Published 18 years 3 months ago • Last updated April 27, 2025 • ⏱️ < 1 min read

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    I've been hacking the PHPIDS recently and I wanted a pure XSS vector not just script execution, I decided to experiment with the applet tag because it sneaks past the malicious tag detection. I thought to myself I wonder if it accepts the type attribute like the object tag does....

    <applet src="data:text/html;base64,PHNjcmlwdD5hbGVydCgvWFNTLyk8L3N jcmlwdD4" type=text/html>

    That works it executes the base64 encoded string as HTML! It doesn't stop there though :)

    <applet src="http://www.businessinfo.co.uk" type=text/html>

    The applet tag even acts like a iframe :D

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