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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: 4, Insightful) by shortscreen on Friday January 10 2020, @01:22AM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Friday January 10 2020, @01:22AM (#941728) Journal

    What advancement? Users are losing control of their hardware and it's being handed over to third parties instead. That's not an advancement. Those third parties that build the websites, build the OS, build the applications, and even the hardware vendors themselves are colluding to ensure that all the locks, adware, backdoors, and spying are required to be enabled for any of their stuff to actually work so the user has fewer opportunities to opt out.

    Remember the bad old days when nobody gave a hoot about security or the fact that two-digit years might wrap around someday? And we had to workaround those mistakes for years afterward? Many people don't remember and they are making the same mistakes today while claiming that it's an advancement. They are still adding those channels for stupidity/malfeasance. They've been saying all along that they'll make the web faster while it has become orders of magnitude slower, and they'll make it easier to use while the GUIs are now some flat monochrome shit from 1983.

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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday January 12 2020, @09:39PM

    by arslan (3462) on Sunday January 12 2020, @09:39PM (#942557)

    You're describing a world where everyone is at your level and situation. Reality is it is not. I've been working in the financial sector for the last couple decades, I can tell you it is a race to the bottom as tech is a cost center and the profit centers want everything cheap and quick. Even right now when we have Royal Commissions and bank CEOs/Chairmans being fired for negligence here in Oz - it is business as usual.

    Control of hardware? I'd rather trust amazon/google than our poorly funded low cost resource center when it comes to plumbing and basic sanitation.