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]
114 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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] -5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I only allow JS on a whitelist.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

A whitelist wouldn't mitigate this issue entirely due to bundling

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

In this case the script wasn't bundled at all - it was hotlinked from a third party CDN. Adding malicious code instantly affects all the sites that load it.

The output differs depending on browser (it only loads the polyfills your browser needs) so it's incompatible with subresource integrity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Imo, computing, like all other things, requires a little trust and risk. The problem is most people are Wayyy to trusting in general.