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The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites (sansec.io)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by 0x815@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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The polyfill.js is a popular open source library to support older browsers. 100K+ sites embed it using the cdn.polyfill.io domain. Notable users are JSTOR, Intuit and World Economic Forum. However, in February this year, a Chinese company bought the domain and the Github account. Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io. Any complaints were quickly removed (archive here) from the Github repository.

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[+] parpol@programming.dev 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Flash ran as a browser plugin (as in not an extension, but a native binary that is installed into the OS and runs beside the browser, we basically don't do this for anything now)

Flash was pretty much on weekly security bulletins in the final years, arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation exploits were common, that's why Adobe killed it.

Flash was never safe and comparing JavaScript to it as a greater risk shows you've not fully understood the threat model of at least one of the two.

[+] parpol@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

That's literally the one main somewhat valid use case for plugins, and it's basically because of DRM. A plugin that allows arbitrary code to run is a security nightmare, that's why we don't do it anymore.

A lot of the security features you describe were added by browser vendors late in the game because of how much of a security nightmare flash was. I was building web software back when this was all happening, I know first hand. People actually got pissy when browsers blocked the ability for flash to run without consent and access things like the clipboard. I even seem to remember a hacky way of getting at the filesystem in flash via using the file upload mechanism, but I can't remember the specifics as this was obviously getting close to two decades ago now.

Your legitimate concerns about JavaScript are blockable by the browser.

Flash was a big component of something called the evercookie—one of the things that led to stuff like GDPR because of how permanently trackable it made people. Modern JavaScript tracking is (quite rightfully) incredibly limited compared to what was possible with flash around. You could track users between browsers FFS.

You're starting to look like you don't know what you're talking about here.