Basically title, curious as I know this had been brought up a while ago but never really followed up on the topic

  • BehindTheBarrier
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    3 months ago

    I know my job banned .zip domains as soon as they leared of it. It’s an IT firm so they don’t really care to take any chances, and would rather just make exceptions if needed.

      • BehindTheBarrier
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        3 months ago

        They are just more likely to be scam like, particularly since they can be assumed to be a file at a glance.

        Even more deviously, crafty urls like this further hides what you are actually doing, like this:

        https://github.com∕kubernetes∕kubernetes∕archive∕refs∕tags∕@v1271.zip

        Hover it with your cursor, watch what that actually links too, no markup cheating involved. Anything before the @ is just user information. Imagine clicking that and thinking you downlodaed a tagged build, only to get a malware?

        It’s not the end of the world, but as a developer it makes great sense to just auto-block it to avoid an incident. The above URL is from this article, which says it’s not as big of huge problem too:

        https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/google_zip_mov_domains/

        But it’s kind of a death by a thousand cuts to me, because it’s another thing with another set of consideration accross the internet ecosystem that one will have to deal with.

      • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Software that creates hyperlinks whenever it finds text that might be a URL, combined with ubiquitous use of .zip extension for compressed files.

        • Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          Are there any exploits that have ever made use of TLD <-> file extension confusion? This seems really unlikely to help pull off an attack, even if the TLD was .exe, but maybe I’m overly optimistic.