Steal Web Session Cookie

What the technique is

An adversary may steal web application or service session cookies and use them to gain access to web applications or Internet services as an authenticated user without needing credentials. Web applications and services often use session cookies as an authentication token after a user has authenticated to a website. Cookies are often valid for an extended period of time, even if the web application is not actively used. Cookies can be found on disk, in the process memory of the browser, and in network traffic to remote systems. Additionally, other applications on the targets machine might store sensitive authentication cookies in memory (e.g. apps which authenticate to cloud services). Session cookies can be used to bypasses some multi-factor authentication protocols. There are several examples of malware targeting cookies from web browsers on the local system. Adversaries may also steal cookies by injecting malicious JavaScript content into websites or relying on User Execution by tricking victims into running malicious JavaScript in their browser. There are also open source frameworks such as Evilginx2 and Muraena that can gather session cookies through a malicious proxy (e.g., Adversary-in-the-Middle) that can be set up by an adversary and used in phishing campaigns. […]

What MITRE says you would watch

• AN1402

  Detects suspicious access to browser session cookie storage (e.g., Chrome’s Cookies SQLite DB) or memory reads of browser processes. Anomalous injection or memory dump utilities targeting browser processes such as chrome.exe, firefox.exe, or msedge.exe.

• AN1403

  Detects access to known browser cookie files (e.g., ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/cookies.sqlite, ~/.config/google-chrome/) and suspicious reads of browser memory via /proc/[pid]/mem or ptrace.

• AN1404

  Detects unauthorized access to browser cookie paths (e.g., ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies) or task_for_pid/vm_read calls to Safari/Chrome memory space.