Hacker Discovered A Vulnerability In Gmail That Allows Anyone To Hack Any Email Account

                               If you click on the gear button in Gmail and after you will see two modules there one with a name of ” Account and Import ” > ” Send Mail As ” and Forwarding Module was affected. This is a logical vulnerability which allowed me to hijack email addresses from Gmail. Any Gmail address which is associated or connected with Gmails SMTP was vulnerable to this security issue. It could be @gmail.com or @googlemail.com or @googleemail.com etc. We are aware of the fact that Gmail gives us report regarding the mail delivery if email was sent or not, Likely if we send email to any email addresses which dose not exist or is offline Gmail will bounce back a message with a subject of Delivery Status Notification which contains the reason why Gmail actually failed to deliver your email to the recipient.

To hijack any email address there should be any of the following case in order to make it successful

• If recipients smtp is offline
• If recipient have deactivated his email
• If recipient dose not exist
• If recipient exists but have blocked us
• Cases could be even more 

In all of the above cases recipient wont be able to receive any email from our addresses and all i needed was a bounced Delivery Notification because Emails which were getting bounced back with a notification stating that your email wasn’t delivered for the following reason was also responsible for containing Verification Code and Activation Link with a complete message which was sent for verification to the given address which you want to associate with. Now that verification code could be used to verification and confirm the ownership of the email address, This actually which kills the concept of verification. Same procedure was also applied to Email forwarding module and i also found it vulnerable. All we need is addresses which is not capable to receive emails from our side referring to the cases mentioned above.

In the image shown above you can clearly see how Gmail was bouncing back the email which contains the content forwarded for verification to the recipient and contains link and code for verification to confirm ownership.

There is a scenario where attacker can trick victim in deactivating his account or attacker can also trick victim in blocking his email address so that he may not be able to receive emails from outside and once he dose that we can hijack his email address easily because gmail was bouncing back the email which contains the verification code. Moreover Forwarding section also requires a confirmation which was also affected.

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Alisa Esage G

Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.