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.
nah. over 100k sites ignored dependency risks, even after the original owners warned them this exact thing would happen.
the real story is 100k sites not being run appropriately.
The hackers just engaged in a little bit of technical debt collecting ;)
I’m stealing this phrase
Please do! I’ve been trying to make it stick for almost a decade!
That’s not how systemic problems work.
This is probably one of the most security ignorant takes on here.
People will ALWAYS fuck up. The world we craft for ourselves must take the “human factor” into account, otherwise we amplify the consequences of what are predictable outcomes. And ignoring predictable outcomes to take some high ground doesn’t cary far.
The majority of industries that actually have immediate and potentially fatal consequences do exactly this, and have been for more than a generation now.
Damn near everything you interact with on a regular basis has been designed at some point in time with human psychology in mind. Built on the shoulders of decades of research and study results, that have matured to the point of becoming “standard practices”.
Ok, people will always fuck up, so what do you do?
The majority of industries that actually have immediate and potentially fatal consequences do exactly this, and have been for more than a generation now.
All the organizations (including public) getting ransomware and data stolen, it’s because the consequences are not that bad? It is not gross negligence?
One place I worked at recently was still using Node version 8. Running
npm installwould give me a mini heart attack… Like 400+ critical vulnerabilities, it was several thousand vulnerabilities all around.Running
npm installwould give me a mini heart attackIt should; but more because it installs things right off the net with no validation. Consistency of code product is not the only thing you’re tossing.
How else would you get LPAD ? Expect me to write 2 lines of code when I could just import a 100 Mb library to do it for me?
You need to get up to date from three years ago. NodeJS 16.20, or thereabouts, enabled dependency auditing by default.
I’m still fighting my engineers go get current enough to use this (but we do have a proxy artifact server that also attempts to keep downloads clean, and a dependency scanner)
If you’re on RHEL 8+, you can install the latest version of node with dnf.
dnf install nodejswill likely install node 8 :(. Usednf module install nodejs:20to install the latest version.After the first 100, the other 300 kinda don’t matter.
the real story is 100k sites not being run appropriately.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
Yeah this is just capitalistic business in general. Don’t do anything proactive if it might reduce the bottom line in the short term. Blame others and beg for help when you weren’t proactive. Succeed singularly, fail collectively
You just described my coworker…
This isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us.
100k sites ignored dependency risks
JS: typing systems are boring, warnings are boring, security is boring.
Sure, the package managers of other languages are super safe
You’re confused. It’s unrelated to package managers, it’s about basic security principles like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subresource_Integrity but JS devs don’t care.
Finding new ways webshits fuck up the most basic development principles boggles my mind. It’s like they intentionally stay ignorant.
They’re widely variable. PyPI gets into about as much trouble as npm, but I haven’t heard of a successful attack on CPAN in years (although that may be because no one cares about Perl anymore).
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I don’t think we have to choose. “Maintain your websites so you don’t get taken advantage of” and “Here’s an example of a major-world-power-affiliated group exploting that thing you didn’t do” are both pretty important stories.
I mean, both are true? It’s not a manipulative headline in my opinion.
The malware thing still deserves a headline. They just argue it’s stupid so many even have to use the library to begin with.
Probably at your local asian gay bar.
This is why ublock origin is an essential security tool.
What rules can we add that solve this problem? (I’ve tried DDG but didn’t find any results)
This one is already in the default
uBlock filters - Badware risksI also strongly suggest adding https://big.oisd.nl/ as a filter list. It’s a large and well maintained domain blocklist (sourced from combining lots of other blocklists) that usually adds lots of these sorts of domains quickly and has very few false positives.
If you want to take it even further, check out the Pro list and Thread Intelligence Feeds list here https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
These can all be added to a pihole too if you use one.
Looks like I’ll need to set up pihole then. Thanks for the info!
cdn.polyfill.io^ ? By now it was probably already added to the default lista tho…
(I dont really understant these things tho, so correct me if I’m wrong)
Man, the Chinese are becoming a new major nuisancec on internet.
Is therea way to ground them for a month while they think about what they did?
Take away his honeyNo more honey on school nightsEdit: could the US/NATO ground China in some debilliting/deterrent way? Like geopolitically/economically spank them and send them to bed without dinner until they come to Jesus?
All Chinese businesses are owned by the CCP, except the ones that get caught being naughty. Suddenly those are a private business with no ties to the party.
All it would really take is internet providers to black hole the China AS numbers in their BGP configs. Then boom China basically can’t talk to the rest of the world.
This should be done with the new axis of evil and let them see how much they truly hate and “need” the destruction of the decadent West. Its insane their shenanigans are still being tolerated at all, cut em off and let them build their own self-sustaining economies and force the West to eliminate their dependance on mercurial and malicious actors on the world stage.
Let’s not make the splinternet a reality, pretty please.
Chinese scaling and manufacturing, Russian IT expertise, Iranian experience of sanctions evasion and North Korean hacking and remote operations mastery are not the combo you want to bet against.
They would absolutely build the self-sustaining economy and rival networks, but in the process it would destroy the Internet as we know it, and break communication channels that are vital for democracy and international peace, while also breaking communications between relatives and friends on the two sides.
Unrelated but last time they came to Jesus in China 20 million people died.
My favourite part is that the developers that currently own it said:
Someone has maliciously defamed us. We have no supply chain risks because all content is statically cached
https://github.com/polyfillpolyfill/polyfill-service/issues/2890#issuecomment-2191461961
Completely missing the point that they are the supply chain risk, and the fact that malicious code was already detected in their system (to the point where Google started blocking ads for sites that loaded polyfill .io scripts.
We don’t even know who they are - the repo is owned by an anonymous account called “polyfillpolyfill”, and that comment comes from another anonymous account “polyfillcust”.
Pollyfilladmin
Reposting my comment from Github:
A good reminder to be extremely careful loading scripts from a third-party CDN unless you trust the owner 100% (and even then, ownership can change over time, as shown here). You’re essentially giving the maintainer of that CDN full control of your site. Ideally, never do it, as it’s just begging for a supply chain attack. If you need polyfills for older browsers, host the JS yourself. :)
If you really must load scripts from a third-party, use subresource integrity so that the browser refuses to load it if the hash changes. A broken site is better than a hacked one.
And on the value of dynamic polyfills (which is what this service provides):
Often it’s sufficient to just have two variants of your JS bundles, for example “very old browsers” (all the polyfills required by the oldest browser versions your product supports) and “somewhat new browsers” (just polyfills required for browsers released in the last year or so), which you can do with browserslist and caniuse-lite data.
That GitHub “archive here” link leads to a page where it hasn’t been archived… (or was the archive removed??).
Looks like someone tried to archive an archived page. You can see
https://web.archive.org/...is listed twice in the url. I just trimmed off the first one then it works: https://web.archive.org/web/20240229113710/https://github.com/polyfillpolyfill/polyfill-service/issues/2834Sorry, it’s corrected now (and thanks@DocMcStuffin)
Again?
Whichever editor let them post “100 thousand” should be spanked one 100 times with the severed hand of whatever asshole wrote it in the first place.
spanked one 100 times
One 100 times or 1 time, but 100 times?
100x one 100 thousand times
Or one,100? 1,hundred? 1’100? Eleventy 100?
Yes
This is probably connected to China cloning the entire GitHub website to their own servers.
I’d be surprised if it’s directly linked
Being linked is how the malware works
🥁 ba dum tish 🥁
What’s the malware do?
Frustrating that the article doesn’t specify and simply links to a different Github page which doesn’t clearly specify the problem either.
I have to assume the site’s article was dynamically generated, without any actual tech journalist doing the reporting. The byline is “Sansec Forensics Team” which doesn’t even link out to the group. Also, the “Chinese Company” isn’t named either it the article or the references, which is incredibly shoddy reporting. The archive link is dead.
This whole page is indicative of the failed state of tech journalism. A genuinely explosive story but its so threadbare and vague that it becomes meaningless.
Noscript would fix this issue… Deny most of that shit and internet still works… Mostly
Not a solution. Much of the modern web is reliant on JavaScript to function.
Noscript made sense when the web was pages with superfluous scripts that enhanced what was already there.
Much of the modern web is web apps that fundamentally break without JS. And picking and choosing unfortunately won’t generally protect from this because it’s common practice to use a bundler such as webpack to keep your page weight down. This will have been pulled in as a dependency in many projects and the site either works or does not based on the presence of the bundle.
Not saying this is a great situation or anything, but suggesting noscript as a solution is increasingly anachronistic.
Much of the modern web is reliant on JavaScript to function.
“function” is doing a lot of lifting there. Trackers, ads, and assorted other bullshit is not the kind of functioning anyone needs.
It’s true the average user gets flummoxed quickly when the scripts are blocked, but they can either sink (eat ads and trackers) or swim (learn what scripts to allow). (Spoiler: they almost always sink)
This will have been pulled in as a dependency in many projects and the site either works or does not based on the presence of the bundle.
This wasn’t bundled. People inserted a script tag pointing to a third-party CDN onto their sites. The output changes depending on the browser (it only loads the polyfills needed for the current browser) so you can’t even use a subresource integrity hash.
Not a solution. Much of the modern web is reliant on JavaScript to function.
And much of it works better and faster without JavaScript. Some sites don’t work in Noscript, but most sites run faster and work well enough.
.
I only allow JS on a whitelist.
A whitelist wouldn’t mitigate this issue entirely due to bundling
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.
Imo, computing, like all other things, requires a little trust and risk. The problem is most people are Wayyy to trusting in general.
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Flash was magnitudes worse than the risk of JS today, it’s not even close.
Accessibility is orthogonal to JavaScript if the site is being built to modern standards.
Unfortunately preference is not reality, the modern web uses JavaScript, no script is not an effective enough solution.
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Well, by that measure, you don’t need JavaScript to make inaccessible sites, there are plenty of sites out there that ruin accessibility with just HTML and CSS alone.
It’s always up to the developer to make sure the site is accessible. At least now it seems to be something that increasingly matters to search result rankings
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Flash ran as a browser plugin (as in not an extension, but a native binary that is installed into the OS and runs beside the browser, we basically don’t do this for anything now)
Flash was pretty much on weekly security bulletins in the final years, arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation exploits were common, that’s why Adobe killed it.
Flash was never safe and comparing JavaScript to it as a greater risk shows you’ve not fully understood the threat model of at least one of the two.
100% agree. A super-fast text only internet layer is approved.
and internet still works… Mostly
That load-bearing “mostly” is doing a lot of work here.
I invite everybody to find out how everything “mostly” works if you disable “most of” javascript – also have fun deciding which parts to enable because you think they’re trustworthy
I actively do this with uMatrix - granted, I only block non-first-party JavaScript. Most sites I visit only require a few domains to be enabled to function. The ones that don’t are mostly ad-riddled news sites.
There are a few exceptions to this - AWS and Atlassian come to mind - but the majority of what I see on the internet does actually work more or less fine when you block non-first-party JavaScript and some even when you do that. uMatrix also has handy bundles built-in for certain things like sites that embed YouTube, for example, that make this much easier.
Blocking non-first-party like I do does actually solve this issue for the most part, since, according to the article, only bundles that come from the cdn.polyfill.io domain itself that were the problem.
You’re still trusting that the 1st party javascript won’t be vulnerable to supply chain attacks, though
In my experience, first-party JavaScript is more likely to be updated so rarely that bugs and exploits are more likely than supply chain attacks. If I heard about NPM getting attacked as often as I hear about CDNs getting attacked, I’d be more concerned.
Funny that they want you to allow all java scripts but then criticise first party scripts for being unsave.
I bet [insert random autocrat here] would approve of that message.
I invite everybody to find out how everything “mostly” works if you disable “most of” javascript – also have fun deciding which parts to enable because you think they’re trustworthy
Having done this for many many years, I can tell you: if you allow the site scripts (which is an acknowledgement of js at least), and a few “big” ones like ajax.google.com, jquery.com, and ytimg.com, etc., you then find a smaller subset of annoying-but-necessary-for-individual-websites that you can enable as needed or just add them as trusted if you’re into that kind of thing.
After that you have the utter garbage sites with 30 scripts of tracking data-sucking bullshit (CNN, looking at you) and for those sites I have said “Thou shalt bite my shiny metal ass” and i just don’t go there.
It’s a concession to js, yes, but it’s also not free rein to trample all over the surfing experience. Totally worth the time to work out.
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I’ve been using noscript for years.
Yeah, it took me about that long to get my regular websites working right too. And then i had to reinstall for unrelated reasons and all that customisation was gone.
While you can back it up, at least once you’ve suffered the loss multiple times you can get it 90% back on first re-visit after reinstall.
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