Plague of web bugs descend on British sites:  HSBC & Barclays bitten

Dan Goodin reports from in San Francisco

It's been a busy week for high-profile web vulnerabilities, with discoveries of careless bugs on the sites of three British companies.

Online banking sites for HSBC and Barclays Group and the website for The Telegraph were caught with their pants down, as hackers published screenshots and other details that showed all three were susceptible to attacks that could compromise the security of people who visit the properties.

The XSS, or cross-site scripting, errors on HSBC were still present on a variety of HSBC sites on Monday afternoon California time, some 48 hours after the XSSed blog first reported them. The bugs allowed attackers to inject javascript and content into HSBC websites simply by tricking a user into clicking on a specially manipulated web address.

"Malicious people can exploit these bugs to conduct phishing attacks and infect bank customers and site visitors with crimeware," the blog warned.