peerjacking

Peerjacking is a term used to describe the manipulation or hijacking of interactions and trust relationships among peers in a network in order to gain unauthorized access, influence, or to disseminate content. It commonly involves exploiting the established trust between participants in peer-to-peer systems, collaborative platforms, or social networks, where peer relationships are used to authorize actions or share resources.

Common mechanisms are high-level: social engineering to obtain credentials from a trusted peer; session hijacking that takes over an active user session; impersonation or spoofing of a legitimate peer; and abuse of weak authentication or authorization that assumes trust between peers. Attacks may also leverage compromised devices, misconfigured clients, or trusted message channels to bypass controls.

Contexts and impact: In peer-to-peer software, a compromised peer can introduce malicious content or access others' data by exploiting the trust network. In collaborative or enterprise environments, attackers may request access, exfiltrate information, or spread malware by convincingly acting as a colleague. In social networks, peerjacking can amplify misinformation or privacy violations by leveraging social trust.

Prevention and detection: Strengthen authentication and session management, use encryption and cryptographic identity verification, apply least-privilege access, and implement integrity checks for data and content shared between peers. Monitor cross-peer activity for anomalies, and educate users about phishing and social engineering. Incident response should include revoking credentials, isolating affected peers, and auditing trust graphs and access logs.

Legal and ethical considerations: Peerjacking is typically illegal under computer misuse, privacy, and data protection laws, and may also violate terms of service. Researchers study related attack vectors to improve defenses but must avoid providing actionable exploit instructions. See also: session hijacking, trust exploitation, and man-in-the-middle.