Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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What do you believe is going to happen if you visit a less-than-trustworthy site? For a drive-by exploit to work (assuming there is one, just because a site is "shady" it doesn't mean it will be 100% sure that it will try to infect your computer with something) it will need to make a TON of assumptions about your setup and chances are (here again the probability that security types ignore) you wont be affected.

And really those issues should be solved at the browser level not the OS level level that affects every single application that runs on it. And AFAIK they already are.

I do not want my compiler or game or renderer or whatever else to certainly become slower just because someone may visit a site that may have an infected ad that may match an exploit their browser may have and may manage to extract some information that may be useful for whoever wrote the exploit (assuming they even manage to get that info back).

Also a cryptominer will only work for as long as you have the site open, of all the things that could go wrong, this is the most benign one.

> And really those issues should be solved at the browser level not the OS level level that affects every single application that runs on it.

They aren't -- this is exploitable in the browser if not patched at the OS level.

> For a drive-by exploit to work (assuming there is one, just because a site is "shady" it doesn't mean it will be 100% sure that it will try to infect your computer with something) it will need to make a TON of assumptions about your setup

If you run these on an ad network, you get access to millions of different setups - you don't need to make any assumptions, you're virtually guaranteed to find someone with a vulnerable setup.

Yes, but the chances are very low that the someone is you if you're using a recent browser version (I'd say not cutting edge, but recent). Probably far, far lower if you use uBO or similar. On Linux, at home, they're probably infinitesimal unless you're being targeted.

Mostly FUD. It's not really exploitable in a practical real world sense. Show me the exploit that can read my password or SSH key, and not some fixed set of data that's been staged by the PoC.

The problem is, without using all mitigation, at all times you /may/ have been exploited. So every time your system acts weird, you'll have that extra doubt. And can it can be pretty difficult to get remove a sophisticated exploit. I could see a sophisticated exploit network probing, tagging and targeting different exploits, for profit or just for fun. Probably not worth the risk for "most" people.

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