71–80 of 104 posts
An article from 2018:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-websites...
And uBlock Origin's "Badware" filter blocks it:
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people even double check installers are digitally signed? There's so much open source stuff out there that is not digitally signed, most people might not even notice.
I use winget or homebrew, those tools do so for me and if something doesn't match they show an error.
Whether Authenticode provides a sufficient authenticity check is yet another question, of course. Still, file integrity verification is just a side-effect.
I've started using winget to install my apps for exactly this reason. I can't keep track of every url for every piece of software.
Is that safe? Microsoft's policy [1] seems to say that anyone can publish an update to a package as long as it passes "an automated process" which checks that it's "not known to be malicious". [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/pa...
WinGet is not only unreliable, it is but one step removed from Remote Code Execution as a Service. Well, maybe one-and-a-half, if package repo maintainers were to pay attention, but that’s not realistic.
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> Your machine runs a little slower, your bandwidth gets a little thinner, and someone halfway around the world is routing traffic through your home IP. I wish in 2026 the default on new computers (Windows + Mac) was not only "inbound firewall on by default" but also outbound and users having to manually select what is allowed. I know it is possible, it's just not the default and more of a "power user" thing at the m…
It doesn't make sense to expect the companies promoting Windows or MacOS to allow the user to potentially interfere with their "services" and surveillance business model
Windows and MacOS both "phone home" (unfiltered outgoing connections). If computer owners running these corporate OS were given an easy way to stop this, then it stands to reason that owners would stop the connections back to the mothership. That means loss of surveillance potential and lost revenue
As of 2006, still nothing stops anyone from setting the gateway of their computer running a corporate OS to point to a computer running a non-corporate OS that can do the outbound filtering
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I see "modern Windows experience", it always turns to be worse than the original one.
I take your point, and usually you're right, but in this case "modern features" includes things like having an "extract" button show up when you right click an archive file in Explorer.
I’m not even joking, they are basically superior in every way. They open faster, they have only one visual axis and they support all the shell extensions you remember. (Too many shell extensions could make them just as slow though.)
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I know the potential for bad actors here, but there is legitimate use of these services.
I used to work in the “brand protection” space. Our entire business model was SOC-aaS, scraping, verifying, and ending lookalike sites among other threats. If you’ve banked at Wells Fargo or had an iCloud account, our job was to try and make that a little bit safer.
Fact is the enemy gets a vote and quite many so-called threat actors are buying very capable kits that know what the fingerprint of a clean room virtual instance or VPN looks like.
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> residential proxy node and sells your IP address to third parties for fraud, scraping, and ad abuse. I know the potential for bad actors here, but there is legitimate use of these services. I used to work in the “brand protection” space. Our entire business model was SOC-aaS, scraping, verifying, and ending lookalike sites among other threats. If you’ve banked at Wells Fargo or had an iCloud account, our job was to…
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> It's a fundamentally different threat model and most endpoint protection isn't looking for it because the behavioral signatures look like normal network activity. Is it even possible for a prosumer home router like OPNsense or OpenWRT to detect this?
How many prosumers or otherwise network admins filter outbound traffic though? And of the select few that do—how many are actually 'inspecting' say, outbound TCP/443 (e.g., monitoring traffic volume, looking up destination addresses, and/or inspecting SNIs) for example?
Does the 7-Zip author still refuse to digitally sign or even provide hashes of the official downloads? It's an extremely weird flex, he thinks it's a frivolous waste of time or something.
He's always been an odd one, for a long time he refused to enable even basic hardening features like ASLR and DEP because they made the executables slightly larger. He eventually relented on some of those, but last I heard the more advanced mitigations like HE-ASLR, CFG and GS were still disabled.
7-zip is not a serious project and its use should be strongly discourged.