Microsoft's Jerry Bryant downplayed the threat based on the complexity of the attack and the level of user interaction required for it to work. "In order to possibly be impacted a user must visit a malicious website, be convinced to click and drag items around the page and the attacker would need to target a cookie from the website that the user was already logged into."

While all of that is true, though, many users click the little checkbox that says "keep me logged in" so they don't have to enter user credentials every time they visit a site like Facebook, and it is actually fairly simple to lure users into clicking. Valotta created a Facebook game where users by clicking on her clothing to remove it. Voila! A game like that would definitely get users clicking.

What Should You Do?So, the sky is not falling. Successfully executing a 'cookiejacking' attack to extract sensitive credentials does take a fair amount of user interaction, and hopefully informed users know enough not to chase that rabbit down the hole.

At the same time, Valotta is not crying wolf. The 'cookiejacking' technique does work with a little cooperation from the user, and with more than 500 million users on Facebook playing all sorts of silly games, it is not a stretch to think that a significant number of users could be socially engineered to fall for the attack.

Microsoft does not consider the 'cookiejacking' issue to be a big enough threat to warrant an urgent, out-of-band security update for Internet Explorer, but it is allegedly working on a fix that will be available over the next few months. In the meantime, exercise some caution with a little extra common sense, and just because someone asks you to.