Programmers, sysadmins, security researchers, and tech hobbyists copying-pasting commands from web pages into a console or terminal are warned they risk having their system compromised.
A technologist demonstrates a simple trick that’ll make you think twice before copying and pasting text from web pages.
Backdoor on your clipboard?
Recently, Gabriel Friedlander, founder of security awareness training platform Wizer demonstrated an obvious yet surprising hack that’ll make you cautious of copying-pasting commands from web pages.
It isn’t unusual for novice and skilled developers alike to copy commonly used commands from a webpage (ahem, StackOverflow) and paste them into their applications, a Windows command prompt or a Linux terminal.
But Friedlander warns a webpage could be covertly replacing the contents of what goes on your clipboard, and what actually ends up being copied to your clipboard would be vastly different from what you had intended to copy.
Worse, without the necessary due diligence, the developer may only realize their mistake after pasting the text, at which point it may be too late.