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Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 156 posts

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#21
post #10

The scare quotes in the title read as sarcasm but they clearly didn’t intend them as such. An odd choice as I almost overlooked the article assuming it was a tale of some failed hackers.

Are scare quotes the only type of quotes these days? I remember in school we were taught they could be used for emphasis.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#22
post #11

How long until we realize that JIT was a mistake and that we should offer orders of magnitude slower JS in browsers that is actually safe (or start building webpages without JS at all again, which will probably never happen) lest we give every website the ability to take over our device? I'd pay real money for a browser with a slow, safe JS interpreter.

why do you assume an interpreter is any safer than JIT? kinda like saying arrays are better than matrices.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#23
post #11

How long until we realize that JIT was a mistake and that we should offer orders of magnitude slower JS in browsers that is actually safe (or start building webpages without JS at all again, which will probably never happen) lest we give every website the ability to take over our device? I'd pay real money for a browser with a slow, safe JS interpreter.

Most of those bugs were in font rendering.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#24
post #13

>The importance of keeping apps and OSes up to date and avoiding suspicious websites still stands. Unfortunately, neither of those things would have helped the victims hacked by this unknown group. Disabling Javascript would have helped. You can even use tools like uMatrix to set exceptions per site so you're not exposing yourself to every single site on the internet by default. Though you won't see online news sites…

Umatrix is not available for firefox on android anymore. Thanks Mozilla !

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#25
post #24
post #13

>The importance of keeping apps and OSes up to date and avoiding suspicious websites still stands. Unfortunately, neither of those things would have helped the victims hacked by this unknown group. Disabling Javascript would have helped. You can even use tools like uMatrix to set exceptions per site so you're not exposing yourself to every single site on the internet by default. Though you won't see online news sites…

Umatrix is not available for firefox on android anymore. Thanks Mozilla !

Still works great in Pale Moon.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#26
post #24
post #13

>The importance of keeping apps and OSes up to date and avoiding suspicious websites still stands. Unfortunately, neither of those things would have helped the victims hacked by this unknown group. Disabling Javascript would have helped. You can even use tools like uMatrix to set exceptions per site so you're not exposing yourself to every single site on the internet by default. Though you won't see online news sites…

Umatrix is not available for firefox on android anymore. Thanks Mozilla !

[deleted]

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#27
Been playing with tools like angr lately and learning more about binary analysis.

It seems to me that "automatic exploit generation" is improving quite a bit where the infrastructure for analysis is a little tricky to set up, but then you can direct that infrastructure to analyze the code for you. The bad guys and good guys are in a race to find new exploits faster (they always have been) but I've been pretty amazed by the direction I see things going with automation.

I might just go back to pen and paper at this point.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#28
post #2

Why is "expert" in quotes? Aren't 11 zerodays impressive?

It's in quotes because it's a quote from Maddie Stone as opposed to a judgement made by the author.

Totally off topic, but I'm often tripped up by these multiple uses of quotes like this. Why do we use the same symbols out of a huge space for both quoting and sarcasm ?

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#29
Probably a stupid question to ask, and I realise the bigger picture here is that there are sophisticated groups searching for complicated exploits all the time, but are these specific exploits addressed already in the latest software updates for the affected platforms?

Wasn’t clear to me from the article, although I may just have missed it being the idiot that I am.

Re: Hackers used zerodays to infect Windows, iOS, and Android users

#30
post #13

>The importance of keeping apps and OSes up to date and avoiding suspicious websites still stands. Unfortunately, neither of those things would have helped the victims hacked by this unknown group. Disabling Javascript would have helped. You can even use tools like uMatrix to set exceptions per site so you're not exposing yourself to every single site on the internet by default. Though you won't see online news sites…

I find the vast majority of websites need JS. Even if it's a simple download link, the incompetent devs tied it to JS.
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