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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3605 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 30, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Hoping early Monday isn't too late for a small-scale question, so here goes:

In the wake of a friend falling victim to a phishing scam in which they were convinced to send a screenshot of a link to a password reset page (indeed, head-slappingly bad), I'm currently being dragged in real life for my hot take, two-part opinion that

  1. This scam was facilitated by the common advice that you should NEVER follow links because they could be from a hacker and then you will get hacked! and

  2. This advice isn't actually very good, in the sense that nothing bad can really happen to you just from following some random link.

As a web developer I know something about how the web works, but obviously I don't know everything, so I'm curious if someone else can come up with a really bad outcome achievable just by clicking on a link. Could you, say, send an API request to a bank from within your webpage, and then read the response and cookies from the host page? I'm thinking this would be blocked by both browser and site technology. This has to be what CORS is for, right? Not just to annoy me while I'm developing?

Anyway, like I said, suggestions welcome.

No, it's still fairly good advice. If you watch, e.g. the Hacking Google series on YouTube, you'll see the start of the initial Chinese Aurora hack was in fact getting people to click on random links.

The basic idea is that due to weaknesses on some sites (I think XSS -- cross-site scripting is the term) or in other places, you get the people to execute code authenticated as themselves, which sometimes lets you do bad things.

(I am not a front-end person, or a security person, I just have had to follow some of the guidelines and tried to understand why).

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