Kalanick, Benchmark Place Uber Employees In Middle And Both Call To Them To Test Loyalty
August 15, 2017 SAN FRANCISCO - Embroiled in a bitter dispute over control of the company, Uber board members Benchmark Capital and former CEO Travis …
September 26, 2017 WASHINGTON, D.C. - Outwardly disguised as an announcement for the White House’s new STEM funding program, a tweet posted Monday evening by Ivanka Trump proved to actually be a failed attempt at injecting untrusted code into browsers of millions of Twitter users. Cross-site scripting (XSS), the website-based vector chosen by Ivanka, when successfully executed allows attackers to run malicious JavaScript on the browsers of other users.
The intent and target of the ham-handed attempt launched by the President’s daughter remains unclear. The attack, which took the form of a <script>
tag containing the payload, was foiled by Twitter’s competent engineering staff who had taken the time to responsibly escape the characters contained in the tweet’s text.
The tweet, as it originally appeared:
< script>
let PM = “signed”;
if (PM === “signed”) {
let CODING = “4 All”;
}
< /script>— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) September 26, 2017
After spending hours analyzing the attack, security experts are still uncertain of its objective, especially since the code does not make sense or seem to have any effect. Though valid in modern JavaScript engines, the attack's code makes use of bizarre capitalization, strange variable scoping, unnecessary equivalence checks, and does not appear to have any side effects. Some experts voiced opinions that this was an amateurish attempt at obfuscation.
When approached for comment, a White House spokesperson insisted the tweet was just Ivanka being cute, but indicated that they expected Twitter’s recent expansion to 280 characters to “open up a lot of new possibilities”.
This article was originally published on AlwaysTrending, a fantastic (but archived) satire site by Matt Frisbie. Copied here with permission of the author.
August 15, 2017 SAN FRANCISCO - Embroiled in a bitter dispute over control of the company, Uber board members Benchmark Capital and former CEO Travis …
July 27, 2017 Peter Todd, a major contributor to the Bitcoin codebase, completed work earlier this week on an experimental blockchain feature - only …
July 16, 2017 WASHINGTON, D.C. - Findings released today by the Pew Research Center indicate that the popular tech interview question, “In as …
July 14, 2017 In the wake of excitement generated earlier this week from the release of the 8th edition of the ECMAScript specification, the ECMA TC39 …
July 5, 2017 MOUNTAIN VIEW - In an attempt to modernize its course offerings, Coursera announced this week the upcoming release of “Client-side …
June 25, 2017 SAN FRANCISCO - Is the new Twitter user interface ruining your life? Now there’s a way out - if you’re willing to pay for …
June 21, 2017 PALO ALTO - Enjoy working from home, but yearn for the interminable stimulation and irritation of an open office? There’s an app …
June 19, 2017 NEW YORK - Eager to cash in on the machine learning gold rush, this week Etsy threw its custom-embroidered hat into the ring with the …
June 12, 2017 CHICAGO - Normally sporting a jovial and collaborative atmosphere, the office of a downtown software company descended this morning into …