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My wife has a PhD and ran up to date Firefox with noscript, Flash disabled, and ad-blockers, uses webmail, and doesn't install software or download executables
by munin 10y ago
My wife has a PhD and ran up to date Firefox with noscript, Flash disabled, and ad-blockers, uses webmail, and doesn't install software or download executables in general. She still got hacked, due to a bug in Firefox that was exploited despite having noscript and Flash disabled.
How, exactly, would you have educated her?
- haddr 10y agoIt's hard to be "invulnerable" these days. I guess you could avoid the majority of infections by using some "weird" software configuration: such as linux with some nightly built of chromium. I heard that Macs are also quite resistant (still). But these things are very dynamic and change fast. What was good yesterday ("educate" users), may not be relevant any more today.
- xorblurb 10y agoReal question: what kind of website she visited to get such infection? It's quite uncommon (even though theoretically an existing risk pretty much everywhere, and probably even not that hard to do if you control a website)
- munin 10y agoreddit, imgur, news sites. It was via an ad delivered over an ad network, so who knows really.
- williamscales 10y agoSounds like the kind of thing that could get anybody, even a reasonably paranoid person.
- janwillemb 10y agoHow come the adblocker didn't block the ad network?
- munin 10y agoI blame the ad blocker / ad network arms race.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoBy telling her to wait for the man to come home and fix the computer, if I'm reading that comment correctly. (I hope I'm not.)