Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 14 2019, @03:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the friends-don't-let-friends-use-godaddy dept.

GoDaddy has been caught sneakily injecting JavaScript into the websites it hosts.

I recently started having issues with the admin interface of a website I run and decided to check the browser console to see if any errors were being displayed there. There were and among them was an error stating that a JavaScript map file being loaded (and failing) that I did not recognise. This meant that the actual JavaScript file itself was already loaded via my website. This set off all sorts of alarms for me and I started to dig in further.

I checked the file system for any suspicious files, there were none. I checked the source code and templates for evidence of anything that has been added, there was nothing there. Yet all my pages were being served with the following script injected into them just before the closing html tag...

[...] Of course that comment in the script was a give away of what was going on but I didn't immediately want to believe that the website host itself would be injecting a JavaScript script into my website without my consent! Turned out that's exactly what GoDaddy was doing and they justified it as collecting metrics to improve performance.

The technology that's in use here is called Real User Metrics and GoDaddy has a page about it here - Why am I signed up for Real User Metrics?. If you happen to be a customer in US (which I am not but the website is hosted in a US data centre) then you are automatically opted into this service and all your website's pages will have this JavaScript injected into them.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 15 2019, @12:19PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday January 15 2019, @12:19PM (#786867) Journal

    So you're saying"It's one dead parrot!"
    :)

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2