Yahoo has closed a gaping hole that attackers were exploiting to gain access to victims' Yahoo Mail accounts and other restricted areas of site.

The cross site scripting error in the hotjobs.yahoo.com domain allowed the attackers to inject cleverly obfuscated javascript into the page that silently siphoned the cookies used to authenticate Yahoo users when they log in to sections of the portal that require a password. Armed with the cookies, attackers were then given broad control over the victim's Yahoo account, including Yahoo Email and any other service that uses authentication cookies belonging to the yahoo.com domain.

"I guess the beautiful bit about it from an attacker's viewpoint is quite a lot of people would be unaware of what's happened" after accessing a booby-trapped hotjobs URL, said Paul Mutton, an internet services developer for Netcraft who helped discover the exploit. "Not many people will think of changing their password after that happens."

To Yahoo's credit, Mutton said the XSS error was closed within hours of him reporting it to Yahoo's security team. But the episode is a reminder that even the biggest sites can be needlessly sloppy when it comes to handling authentication cookies. The attack would have been impossible to carry out had Yahoo bothered to use http-only cookies.

Yahoo is hardly alone here. Last month, bankofamerica.com, register.com, netflix.com and dozens of other big name sites were caught transmitting credentials that are vulnerable to a new tool called CookieMonster. That attack is neutered when sites use https-only cookies.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said she was looking in to the Netcraft report.

According to Mutton, XSS vulnerability was exploited by hotjobs.com URLs that contained a long series of digits. When transformed into javascript it redirected users to a blank webpage on a different domain. A victim need not enter a user name or password. Visiting the blank page was all that was required to steal an authentication cookie that acts as a universal key across the the entire yahoo.com domain.

At time of writing, the blank page remained up and running. It's unknown if it's being used to attack other websites,