I could have rigged all of the Hackernoon awards but I didn’t :P
I was able to get more than one vote per award :P
Recently Hackernoon announced their “The
Noonies” awards. I wanted to vote for Steemit as the social media website of the
year and visited their page.
I voted for steemit. Since it didn’t ask for login of any type I was curious how
they were keeping track of how many times a user voted. From the URL and source
code I saw that they were using the ids generated by mongodb probably. Once I
voted it was showing the “Cancel vote” icon, so they were making sure that one
user could vote on an award only once. I wanted to check how they were doing.
After a little digging I could see that they were using local storage and they
were keeping a JSON object that had the mapping of all the award the user had
voted on. Once I figured it out it was easy to vote multiple times.
Steps to vote multiple times
- Vote on any award that you are interested in.
- Now open developer console.
- Goto Applications section.
- Click on Local storage from the left tag and select the noonies website.
- Now right click and select “Clear” from the menu.
- Refresh the page and vote again now :)
A simple hack to vote multiple times
There was a huge temptation to post it on a public forum :P But I refrained. I
informed David Smooke and Storm from
Hackernoon team. I waited for the awards to close and now am disclosing this
vulnerability.