The case becomes worse if your website is vulnerable to XSS. Why? Because when you open a new tab by reference from an existing tab, your browser allows this new tab to communicate with the referrer tab by using window.opener API. How Does It Work: imagine you have coded a webpage which has hyperlinks and you have used the target attribute with value _blank in this way: href=“http//:www.yourwebsite.com/a_link” target="_blank" And the link which is being referred here allows the users to put links on this page in some way. For example, Facebook allows you to put a link to your website on your website’s Facebook page. Then a user may place a link to his/her website which has some malicious script on it like: window.opener.location(‘http:fakewebsite.com/fakepage’); When the link is opened in new tab, this malicious code changes the link loaded in the referrer tab. The attacker may place a fake page asking for login, and ultimately collect your credentials. Can I prevent this from happening? Of course you can. By placing this code in your anchor tag, you can prevent your page from being used as a phishing surface. rel=“noopener” If you are lazy enough to risk your security, I suggest a one time solution. Download this from github and include this file as a script source in your next document. If you want to read further, I would advise you to follow the text on this page. And finally,if you have any further queries, feel free to ask in the comments.
