Saturday, 26 June 2010

In Passing

Maliciously scripted


If you’re gonna do this:
“FirstThings requires that you have javascript enabled...”
...then you had better watch out for this:

First Things website had a Malware attack today.  We are working on the problem now.  The warning messages should go away by tomorrow afternoon.  We have removed the ad script that was causing the problem so there is no chance that you will get an infected browser.  It looks like if you run Internet Explorer you won’t see the warning messages but, with Chrome, Safari or Firefox you will still see the messages.

By the way, the attack came from China.
Not a new problem, and in most cases fixable by not permitting scripting code that originates from (or receives variables from) third-party sources, i.e., ad networks.

Of course the networks would scream, but they’ve repeatedly.been.found to be untrustworthy.

And since we seem doomed to a bright new javascript-required-for- even-minimal-functionality web[1], wouldn’t it be nice if some browser creator would come up with javascript controls that give us greater granularity than No Scripts At All/All Scripts?   Possibly one that blocked any scripts not originating within the parent domain, or maybe even one that could be configured to block (or at least warn) when some of the language’s more problematic functions (“eval,” anyone?) are called?

Elsewhere:

(Via)
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[1]  I note the FirstThings site currently loads 10 internal scripts plus three adserver scripts.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:48:50 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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