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The new Chinese owner of the popular Polyfill JS project injects malware into more than 100 thousand sites (sansec.io)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You'd be surprised how much code people blindly reuse without even looking at it, especially in JavaScript. A bunch of it is from projects owned by random individuals. The JS standard library is ridiculously small, so nearly all JS apps import third-party code of some sort. One JS framework can pull in hundreds of third-party modules.

It's much less of an issue with languages like C# and even PHP, where the first-party libraries are often sufficient for building a small or mid-sized app.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

JS and Python are both extremely bad for this. I’ve been working with data scientists and it’s hell trying to tell them that no, they can’t just install whatever libraries they want