Comment by nerdsniper

9 days ago

> less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it

Less common but we just saw a week ago that malware-via-ads is definitely still happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001

This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.

Web browsers let web programmers do what they want. Some things should be native to the browser and not allow any tinkering, like selecting text, copying, etc.

Wow that’s super smart. Obviously I don’t have any sympathy for crypto bros losing money, but it’s easy to see how something like this could be applied to typing account numbers into something else. More safeguards on the latter, but essentially the crypto one is a proof of concept of something that could affect real people.