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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.

Firstly, you say, "just" following a link, as if laymen can be counted upon to just click links and not just arbitrarily download and run things and enter their passwords. In the real world, sometimes you have to lie to people in order to make them do what you want in the first place. In this case, make them extra cautious around websites.

Secondly, I've had this real question and an answer I've gotten from other developers: Websites can probably inject malware onto your file system in the form of cookies, but such malware wouldn't be executed unless from a trigger that a website can't do, so maybe this doesn't answer your question.

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