this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023

21 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers

4 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.

Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.

Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What are the vulnerabilities of going to an unsecure website? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm often told that a site I want to visit is unsecure, so I don't go and am left curious. Let's say I go to a site that doesn't have https, but I only go to browse. I'm not knowingly entering any personal information, what would I be at risk of?

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Data is encrypted when you access a HTTPS site, but not with HTTP. This means a third party can view your connection to the site, and any information submitted by you.

The connection to HTTP can be exploited, and malicious script can be injected to the response you (the user) receive from the server. This can include ads that drain computer resources (memory, CPU usage), or attempts to exploit vulnerabilities within your operating system/browser. As there is no authentication used with HTTP, there is no way for the user to know if the request/response has been changed.

It is considered generally safe to just browse these sites without inputting sensitive data, but the above is something to be aware of.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Two things come to mind:

bad guys being able to see what you’re doing
bad guys sending you something else when you make a request to the website

Both of these cases fall under the category of what’s known as “man in the middle attacks”.

When you visit a site vía HTTPS, it’s using something called Transport Layer Security (TLS). The website encrypts and signs the data coming from it, and your browser verifies that the site is who they say they are and ensures that the data wasn’t tampered with.

Let’s say you visited a site with HTTP (that is, no TLS)… an attacker can sit between you and the real website. They can masquerade as the website and when you go to download that application to your machine, can serve malware to you instead. They also have the opportunity to read anything you’re seeing/doing on the website.

If you’re just going to read some random article and the site is http, there’s unlikely to be any real consequences. These days though, there really isn’t any reason not to use TLS, it’s just so easy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

These days though, there really isn’t any reason not to use TLS, it’s just so easy. Exactly. If someone can be bothered to do some minimal maintenance every few years you can assume the website is already compromised, outdated, or kinda shitty.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That the traffic is intercepted and anything that you type in such as passwords or credit cards is stolen, that the content you see is discovered by a third party (ie. Someone finds out you've been reading X specific content on the website) or that the data is altered in flight and injected with false links or other false information.

It's usually no big deal to visit an "unsecure website" for informational purposes if you don't type in any sensitive info.

Generally speaking treat it like a postcard where everything you write could be read or altered by "mail employees" or other third parties.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I'm using a well-established commercial VPN, would they be able to know my IP or anything else to show others I've used this site?

I'm screening a list of public websites sites for someone. So far, they're all unsecure, so I haven't gone to any of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Using a vpn in this case would hide some info from the site like your IP address. They would only see the IP of the vpn provider instead of your IP assigned to you by your ISP. However, traffic between you and the site is still unencrypted. As others have mentioned, as long as you don’t enter sensitive info while browsing these sites you should be okay.

load more comments