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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: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:17PM (3 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Thursday January 09 2020, @10:17PM (#941640)

    That may be so, but (a) I have no means to give them my electricity in return for site access, and (b) my effort required to lend them CPU time is effectively nil, while other methods require more time/attention from me, including getting account details for a bank transfer, paypal configuration, etc....

    The technical efficiency of letting them mine crypto on my CPU is not very high, but its total efficiency is pretty high (in the form of how much of my time/effort I have to spend on the the setup), about as high as the effort I need to allow ads/tracking, but without the privacy/liberty I have with ads/tracking.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:43PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 09 2020, @11:43PM (#941678)

    While I do value human attention higher than money, I worry about the wonton use of large amounts of energy, however cheap, in exchange for a small amount of human attention.

    Not strictly an attention issue, but... a friend of my Uncle's won a $14M lottery, so naturally he bought whatever boat struck his fancy at the next Miami Boat show. That one didn't really suit him or his wife, so they sold it and bought another that suited him the next year - nothing extravagant, just a 36' open fisherman with about 1200hp hanging on the back - the kind of thing you see at marinas all the time. Well... we went fishing with him one day, just a relaxed 2.5 hour cruise across Florida bay (at 50mph) to Cape Sable and back. Care to guess how many gallons of fuel that was? About 300, for a little fishing trip.

    Because he forgot his diary back home, a Saudi prince dispatched his assistant to take his personal 737 from San Francisco back to the UAE to fetch it... waste of energy on a truly princely scale.

    While you, single person, might not make a hill of beans' difference giving an extra 500 watt hours per day to cryptominers instead of viewing some ads for a few seconds, multiply that by millions of people and it doesn't take long for us to overwhelm the waste of the Saudi Prince's diary fetching order.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Friday January 10 2020, @04:23AM

      by RS3 (6367) on Friday January 10 2020, @04:23AM (#941764)

      You wrote "wonton" and "beans" and now I'm hungry. I'm sure you've written an awesome post and I'll read it later.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday January 10 2020, @10:02PM

      by Unixnut (5779) on Friday January 10 2020, @10:02PM (#942054)

      > While I do value human attention higher than money, I worry about the wonton use of large amounts of energy, however cheap, in exchange for a small amount of human attention.
      The entire human development has been built on laziness (and looking at the rest of life on earth, they follow the same pattern). The inherent desire to get others to do as much of your work as possible. It was slavery for most of the human races existence, until we got energy so cheap, that it was cheaper than slave labour.

      > Not strictly an attention issue, but... a friend of my Uncle's won a $14M lottery, so naturally he bought whatever boat struck his fancy at the next Miami Boat show. That one didn't really suit him or his wife, so they sold it and bought another that suited him the next year - nothing extravagant, just a 36' open fisherman with about 1200hp hanging on the back - the kind of thing you see at marinas all the time. Well... we went fishing with him one day, just a relaxed 2.5 hour cruise across Florida bay (at 50mph) to Cape Sable and back. Care to guess how many gallons of fuel that was? About 300, for a little fishing trip.

      Congrats to them, living the dream. And 300 gallons for 2,5 hours for 1200hp engine is about 120g/hr, or 1 gallon per hour per HP. That sounds about right, boats need quite a bit of power to overcome water resistance, especially if they are large and heavy.

      > While you, single person, might not make a hill of beans' difference giving an extra 500 watt hours per day to cryptominers instead of viewing some ads for a few seconds, multiply that by millions of people and it doesn't take long for us to overwhelm the waste of the Saudi Prince's diary fetching order.

      The thing is, when we get into those kind of arguments, you have to ask how much does the current system waste? All the cpu/memory needed to serve adverts, do browser tracking/spying. To store all that tracking/spying data, then to process it, translate it, sell it to third parties, who then further translate and process it in order to take advantage of the data.

      Then the energy and human time wasted finding ever more ways to track/spy on people, and then other people wasting energy and time finding ways to detect/block it, then those wasting more energy and time obfuscating their trail to make spying harder, others wasting more to de-obfuscate , etc...

      I contend that using crypto as a representation of value, to conduct a transaction between two pseudo-anonymous entities online, in the interest of an online viewer financially supporting an online publisher, even if mined on a slow as hell JS interpreter, would still be more energy efficient than the entire above industry devoted to mass surveillance (not to mention better to humanity).

      If this system can work, it would give people an alternative method to online ads to make money off their content, and if it goes towards killing the spying industry (and knocking companies like Google down a few pegs) I would consider that a good result.