News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on PuTTY 0.68 has been released. Parent comment

Re:PuTTY 0.68 has been released by JohnTHaller on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @07:50PM (#13701835)
It's bad if you use an insecure browser like Chrome. Chrome allows any website you visit to download DLLs directly to your Downloads directory without user interaction. Then, any installer you download and run will use the infected DLLs unless specifically keyed to look in system32 for them.

Additionally, something can infect your PC and alter your PATH. Then PuTTY might pick up a fake Windows DLL from elsewhere on your machine. But if your machine is infected and something is messing with the Windows path, you have bigger problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PuTTY 0.68 has been released by lupin_sansei on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @08:12PM (#13701981)
Thankfully Chrome has fixed this issue. I just tried this and Chrome actually warns you about downloading DLLs and requires further user interaction to actually download DLL to the downloads folder:

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/MvRwZBi.png

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PuTTY 0.68 has been released by JohnTHaller on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @08:53PM (#13702204)
All DLLs or just specific ones? I'd heard a while ago they were going to blacklist specific ones instead of just making it so a user has to purposely decide to download a file.

I'm surprised they finally did something since we've been warning people not to use Chrome because of this issue for years.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PuTTY 0.68 has been released by Sunset on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @01:52AM (#13703655)
>blacklist specific ones

Enumerating badness has always been a very bad idea.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PuTTY 0.68 has been released by Crespyl on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @09:28AM (#13705691)
I'll add that to my list of bad ideas.
[ Parent | on HN ]