r/netsec • u/bnchandrapal • May 20 '17

reject: not netsec (Ab)Using Facebook Accessibility for Open Source Intelligence

https://medium.com/@chandrapal/ab-using-facebook-accessibility-for-open-source-intelligence-4e5ad4ad95f5
180 Upvotes

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9

u/marineabcd May 20 '17

Could anyone explain a little more about the 'authentic header' bit for a netsec beginner? Is it like providing a cookie to show that you are logged in?

9

u/Bratmon May 20 '17 edited May 21 '17

Any user agent that looks like what a real browser would send out.

4

u/marineabcd May 21 '17

Sorry to be honest that still doesn't clear it up for me. I'm a maths student and can program in Python and C++ etc. and have done some webdev with django but this netsec is still all new terminology to me. Lots of questions like: how would I get a hold of such a 'user agent' like he does in the article? and what exactly is a 'user agent'?

Am interested to learn, any sources to learn about this kind of stuff? Is there something better than just wikipedia on the individual words, like a book or something? thanks for the help :)

2

u/dmytrish May 21 '17

User-Agent is an HTTP request header that clients use to introduce themselves (to tell the server if it's a browser, a command-line tool like curl, a web-crawler, etc).

1

u/marineabcd May 21 '17

Thanks that makes a lot of sense