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posted by martyb on Thursday January 09 2020, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the noscript dept.

From ZDNet:

Around half of the websites that use WebAssembly, a new web technology, use it for malicious purposes, according to academic research published last year.

WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode language that was created after a joint collaboration between all major browser vendors.

[...] However, while the vast majority of samples were used for legitimate purposes, two categories of Wasm code stood out as inherently malicious.

The first category was WebAssembly code used for cryptocurrency-mining. These types of Wasm modules were often found on hacked sites, part of so-called cryptojacking (drive-by mining) attacks.

The second category referred to WebAssembly code packed inside obfuscated Wasm modules that intentionally hid their content. These modules, the research team said, were found [as] part of malvertising campaigns.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:33PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 09 2020, @09:33PM (#941606)

    And... if you could mine cryptocurrency using javascript, they would - but why bother when WebAssembly is X faster?

    So, because WebAssembly runs faster we should ban it? Why not just make everybody run Windows 10 and then bog it down so slow that everything, malware included, is too frustrated to run and we all shut our machines off and go have a beer face to face instead?

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