This is going to be a periodical series of tools and tips you can use to survive on the wacky internet.
Adblockers.
Get yourself one, right now. ‘ublock origin’ is good as of 2023, the time of writing.
The reason? Cross Site Scripting, and there being “no money” in stopping it.
Recall a moment, perhaps recently, where you ended up with a pop-up that said your computer was infected and that you’d need to call a number to fix it.
Invariably, these were the results of a bit of javascript (code that can automate web pages) sent along and injected into a malicious advertisement. The purpose is to socially engineer you into believing them, and to invite them into your computer as a pipeline to do severe damage.
The companies who provide these advertisements do not consider this to be a problem, or, if they do, they do not consider it a priority to resolve promptly.
And individuals, with whom I’ve spoken with every day, have to worry about these attacks every day.
Moms, dads, grandmothers, aunts, uncles. Not-so-tech-savvy individuals who didn’t grow up with unfiltered internet access and didn’t learn what social engineering is.
People who didn’t internalize the dangers of the internet like we did.
And then, we made the internet accessible to them. We made it intuitive, without doing our due diligence in teaching people the dangers they tried to impress upon us. By knowing how to navigate the wasteland, we made it seem safe… But it’s not.
There are assholes out there, with hearts full of malice and greed. They don’t care about you, and no words can reach them that would alter their course.
That’s life these days, unfortunately. No acts of wanton violence would stop them, no revolution or fearful closure of paradigms would prevent their will from finding a way.
So, we have to adapt. The approach that has been a mainstay for the past 20+ years has been blocking of advertiser servers.
When the advertisers that send you a bit of dangerous javascript have no access to your computer, the danger is averted.
When you know exactly what you downloaded, and have an antivirus in place, the dangers are further averted.
When you are in control of your computer, your computer will do as you say.
“Manifest v3” is a term I need to introduce you to. The people behind one of the most popular internet browsers are altering it, to enforce the downloading of advertising javascript to your browser with no recourse to block even malicious advertisements.
I can see no way can this backfire.
I can see no way for some jerkwad fashybutt in Russia to hack into a well-meaning website and inject cross-site scripts into their advertisements and gather swathes of IP addresses to attempt to probe for vulnerabilities over time.
Like, I don’t mean to fearmonger but I’d like to introduce you to a well-used tool at work: IP Chicken
So this is IP Chicken, a pretty simple website for displaying your IP address.
Now, that’s pretty cool, but… How’s it do it?
Well, when you connect to a website you send your IP address to the server. It’s basically the phone number for your modem, in the most layman terms.
That IP gets shown back to you on IP Chicken… But, every website on the internet follows this rule when it uses something called TCP/IP.
TCP is called the Transport Control Protocol. In laymans terms, to start a “conversation” you send what’s called a “SYN” packet. Think of packets quite literally like envelopes of encoded information.
A “SYN”— That is, Synchronize— packet, is akin to a small contract that begins the exchange of data between two computers. Think of it like the first draft of a contract.
The next part of the conversation is known as an “ACK” packet— That is, Acknowledgement— It’s the “response” that begins that exchange of data between the two computers.
The obstacle that keeps two random computers from hacking into each other is their obscurity. When you have someone’s home router IP address, you have the means to cause immense problems for someone.
Because of the way that the above protocol works, your computer has never met 99.999999% of the other computers on the internet. That means 99.9999% of malicious users on the internet have been filtered out. They’ve never even known you existed
Well, when you have the technical savvy to hack into an advertiser server and create these requests, to send them out into the ether so to speak?
That creates a problem. When people are given a platform to contact most of the internet, and can do so, and do so with malice, you end up with something called “Botnets”
Botnets don’t require much of a breakdown. They’re automated networks of computers that can engage in cyber attacks from across the internet. Usually old computers with small virus payloads that ran on them, but oftentimes they’re fleets of aws, azure, or google cloud VMs configured with random names.
And Manifest v3 states you must allow them to access your computer. You must.
Manifest v3 pertains to any browser that isn’t Firefox these days. It’s 2023 as I write this. Chromium and Electron dominate the net. In the future, maybe things will change.
Use Firefox, use uBlock Origin, use Privacy Badger.
Learn to use patreon. If you don’t know how to do any of those, I’ll make more posts.
🙂