Security again, LJ vs DW

[thorfinn]

LJ-news: Media embedding change - important notice
DW-maintenance: LJ web security exploit

In short, LJ had a "cross site scripting hack" which infected a bunch of people's accounts. Check the LJ news post and verify you're okay if you're on LJ.

However, Dreamwidth wasn't vulnerable.

Yet another reason to Dump LJ in favour of Dreamwidth.

ETA: If you're not running some kind of flash blocker, you probably want to be.

Safari - http://apple.com/safari - http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/ (Was: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/)

Firefox - http://mozilla.com/firefox - http://noscript.net/ or http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

Opera - http://opera.com/ - http://my.opera.com/Lex1/blog/index.dml/tag/Flashblock

Chrome - http://google.com/chrome - http://www.privoxy.org/ (run a local proxy) or switch to one of the above.

Internet Explorer - http://www.microsoft.com/ie - http://www.privoxy.org/ (run a local proxy) or switch to one of the above.

Comments

[qamar]

What's the issue with flash?--Other than being annoying? :)

[bens_dad]

I think it is just another interpreted language that allows you to read a program from one web site that, when run, writes data into another site in such a way that it will be run later.
The way around this is that each program should run in a "sandbox" so that it can only interact with the site that it was loaded from. I don't know whether the flash interpreter just doesn't have a sandbox, or doesn't have one that does what is says on the tin.

[foxfirefey]

The problem was that LJ had a crossdomain.xml file set up to allow any site to do that, which is apparently a big problem:

http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/sep/the-dangers-of-cross-domain-ajax-with-flash

[thorfinn]

Yech. Yeah, LJ seem to be dropping the ball massively on a lot of things.

Hi, BTW. :-) Do I know you from elsewhere, or were you just tracking this issue and found this post?

[foxfirefey]

Oh, I was keeping track of posts on Dreamwidth like I usually do (in case someone needs assistance), and this one caught my eye because it was also about that issue! But I think I've seen you about a bit, and I wouldn't be surprised if you've seen me about a bit!

[thorfinn]

Each instance of the flash player running chews up CPU and RAM. If you don't have some kind of flash blocker running, every single little tiny piece of flash that exists on any webpage requires one instance of the flash player.

I typically open about 60 tabs at once... 40 flash players later (some pages have 2-3, some none), my computer is grinding, and I'm not even looking at a webpage yet.

Excellent!

[drjon]

Mind if I swipe this post?

Re: Excellent!

[thorfinn]

Go right ahead. :-) It's a public post.

[tcpip]

*nods* Ayup, what you said.