Sigh, Even Copy And Paste Is Out To Get You

Source: Hackaday Sigh, Even Copy And Paste Is Out To Get You

CTRL+Vulnerability

The fact that we can’t have nice things is not new, it’s just that there are more types of devices and components on the market to find flaws with.  As Hackaday reminds us, the only reason that Windows NT was able to get the US Government’s Orange Book C2 security certification was by removing the floppy drive and never installing networking components!  That doesn’t make it any less upsetting when new vulnerabilities are discovered by white hat security wonks such as Michal Benkowki.

He has posted a number of the vulnerabilities he has discovered and reported including a rather disturbing one involving how copy and paste now works.  It seems that it is happy to copy more than just the text you were trying to grab, up to and including properly formatted JavaScript which could run after you paste it.  Interestingly, a simply copy and paste can contain plain text, some HTML, and a special proprietary format if a site is set to feed that into a clipboard when you copy.

Web browsers do their best to prevent this, but are not always successful.  If you are interested in how well your browser of choice does you can follow the link to the Copy and Paste Playground and find out for yourself.

The rest of the post covers fixed bugs in several major browsers and editor systems, including GMail and Google Docs. There is also some discussion of a few systems that remain nameless since the bugs have not yet been fixed.

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About The Author

Jeremy Hellstrom

Call it K7M.com, AMDMB.com, or PC Perspective, Jeremy has been hanging out and then working with the gang here for years. Apart from the front page you might find him on the BOINC Forums or possibly the Fraggin' Frogs if he has the time.

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