this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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906
The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites (sansec.io)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Archived link

The polyfill.js is a popular open source library to support older browsers. 100K+ sites embed it using the cdn.polyfill.io domain. Notable users are JSTOR, Intuit and World Economic Forum. However, in February this year, a Chinese company bought the domain and the Github account. Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io. Any complaints were quickly removed (archive here) from the Github repository.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The malware thing still deserves a headline. They just argue it's stupid so many even have to use the library to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Have to use? No one has to use any library. It’s convenience, and in this case it’s literally so they don’t have to write code for older browser versions.

The issue here isn’t that anyone has to use it, it’s the way it was used that is the problem. Directly linking to the current version of the code hosted by a third party instead of hosting a copy yourself.