Brave aims to curb practice of websites that port scan visitors
arstechnica.com
Brave will allow users to choose which sites can access local network resources.
  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    So I have two questions, first how does a browser stop websites from scanning open ports and second WHY THE FUCK DO WEB SITES SCAN OPEN PORTS

      • perviouslyiner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        In the case of ebay at least, the normal ublock origin seems to prevent this (maybe just incidental that it blocked the loading of the port scanning script?)

        Open “web developer tools”, “network” tab and browse to ebay - if uBlock Origin is turned off, after a few seconds you start to see lots of websocket connections as is shown in the article here. With uBlock Origin enabled, I’m not seeing those.

        EDIT: Raymond confirms this [reddit link] and asks for some ideas on how to specifically block malicious connections to localhost

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        But re 1) I’m so confused, how does the browser have access to such information, never mind an addon?

        I get that browsers can do way more than tcp port 80 these days, but I didn’t know it can do so much, man.

        Or is that sniffing so closely related to the web site itself, i.e. is the actual web server doing it? I would expect that if someone would want to snoop on my network, they’d be using something else than a web server.

        Guess I need an eli10 for modern browsers.