In this haktip Shannon shows us the setup and use of the cookie steeling tool Firesheep to hijack Darren’s twitter session.

Websites always make you login with a username and password, but when you’re on their page all cozy and logged in, you’re browsing insecurely on a regular old HTTP site. HTTP session hacking (called sidejacking) happens when an attacker gets the users cookie which you were transmitted when you first logged in, and they can use it to do anything you would normally do. The only way to really protect yourself from this is through SSL or HTTPS like what you see on your banking websites.

Firesheep, by Eric Butler, demonstrates how vunerable your login is. It’s a man in the middle attack firefox extension that anyone has the ability to use.

To use Firesheep, first make sure to download winpcap. Then download the browser extension and open it using firefox by dragging it into your list of extensions and add-ons. You may need to restart Firefox. Go to View–>Sidebar–>Firesheep and enable it. Now, simply click start capturing and you’ll be able to see the username and photo of anyone on your network that logs into one of the specific sites that Firesheep uses. Click on the name or photo of anyone on the list, and you are now logged in as them, with the ability to do whatever you want as them on that site. Scary huh? Luckily Twitter and Facebook have caught on to this and have enabled the ability to use HTTPS secure logins on their sites. So if you haven’t updated your settings, do it now!