“Gigabytes of junk data could be dumped onto PCs via a loophole in web code, a developer has found,” BBC News reports.
“The loophole exploits a feature of HTML 5 which defines how websites are made and what they can do,” The Beeb reports. “Developer Feross Aboukhadijeh found the bug and set up a demo page that fills visitors hard drives with pictures of cartoon cats.”
The Beeb reports, “In one demo, Mr Aboukhadijeh managed to dump one gigabyte of data every 16 seconds onto a vulnerable Macbook. Most major browsers, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari, were found to be vulnerable to the bug, said Mr Aboukhadijeh… Only Mozilla’s Firefox capped storage at 5MB and was not vulnerable, he found… In a bid to solve the problem, bug reports about the exploit have been filed with major browser makers.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Margaret G.” and “Peter S.” for the heads up.]
