Simon Willison’s Weblog

Watch out for Javascript in referrals

20th February 2003

Here’s a good reminder why you should always encode < and > as HTML entities when displaying content from an untrusted (i.e external) source: Kasia in a nutshell was hit by a false referrer containing javascript deliberately aimed at hijacking the page the referrer was displayed on:

<script>top.location.href='http://redirect_to_this_assholes_page';</script>

She even got a link from The Register for her troubles.