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Showing posts from January, 2021

Formula Injection

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    What is Formula injection? 📌Formula injection, also known as CSV Injection occurs when the application export dynamically constructed spreadsheet documents (example .csv or .xls ) which may contain untrusted user-supplied data. 📌Upon opening the exported document, recipient's spreadsheet program can interpret those untrusted data/inputs as formulas and execute them on the recipient's system. 📌The attacker usually injects a malicious payload or formula into the input field. Once the data is exported and the file is opened, the spreadsheet application interprets and executes the malicious input on the assumption of a standard macro. H ow does it happen?    A spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or Libre Office Calc etc. provides various in-built functions and formulas that can be used to perform other data analysis.  In the case of formula injection, any cells starting with special characters, eg, " = ", " + ", " - ", or " @ "