Lev Lazinskiy

R1D19 Moonshots Day 2; Clickjacking for the greater good.

On day two of my moonshot, I glue together all of the missing pieces to get the data to flow from pardot to inka.

Pardot allows you to inject arbitrary javascript into any form that you create. I used this to my advantage and basically stole the submit button event, temporarily sending data back to my own server for further processing (and eventual order input into inka.io) and then resubmitting the form as usual.

The code to get this to work on the JS side looks something like this:

(function() {
    var form = document.forms[0]

    function sendOrder(order, event) {
        xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
        xhr.open("POST", "https://$MY_SERVICE", true);
        xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type": "application/json");

        xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
            if(xhr.readyState = XMLHttpRequest.DONE && xhr.status == 200) {
                event.target.submit();
            }
        }

        xhr.send(order);
    }

    form.addEventListener("submit", function(event) {
        event.preventDefault();

        // Code to Process Form 

        sendOrder(order, event);
    }
})();

The key thing to keep in mind is that if you do event.target.submit() before the XMLHTTPRequest finishes, then it may never process the full request. This is why we pass it into the function, and perform the resubmission of the form after the response has gone through.

This was a fun little hack, but the solution is far from perfect.

Problems

It’s also overly complex and the form parser is very jenky because it’s making some very poor assumptions about what this from will always look like. Since the form is ultimately generated by pardot, it is subject to change without notice at any time.

Further Improvements

However any sort of javascript validation is error prone as we have seen in this lovely $170 Million mistake.

Another improvement would be to send an email to someone in the event that we were not able to process an order so that a human being could attempt to do it manually.

Despite some of theses setbacks, I was able to have pardot send from data to my laptop via ngrok, process the data, and automatically place a T-Shirt order on inka.io.