In their rush to implement Web services, some companies may be exposing themselves to new security risks that they may not fully understand, a security researcher said yesterday. During a presentation at the CanSecWest/core06 conference, researcher Alex Stamos outlined how a number of Web services technologies, including AJAX and the XQuery query language, could be exploited by hackers to dig up secret information and attack systems.
Web services is a catch-all expression used to describe a form of distributed computing that uses standards based on XML to simplify the job of programming software. One of its key tenets is that Web services applications are extremely portable and can easily interact with different types of software.
