Discord file links will expire after a day to fight malware
(www.theverge.com)
from kalkulat@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Nov 2023 23:37
https://lemmy.world/post/7849757
from kalkulat@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 05 Nov 2023 23:37
https://lemmy.world/post/7849757
“Attackers, Trellix wrote, use the platform’s webhooks to pull data from victims’ computers and drop it into Discord channels run by the attackers.”
#selfhosted
threaded - newest
I wonder if McAfee changing their name to Trellix to escape how much the general public hates them will work better than Comcast rebranding as Xfinity.
Idk, but this issue was discovered by “Trellix” which is McAfee.
The general public doesn’t hate McAfee that much, so I’d bet it’ll work. Heck, I work in IT and I didn’t even know about the rebrand (mostly because I engage with McAfee as little as possible).
probably about as well as Twitter becoming “X, formerly known as Twitter”
Yeah let’s keep that going here. From here on our whenever I see Trelix I will say “Trelix, the brand fomally known as McAfee.”
or just call them mcafee, twitter, facebook, etc
Yes, but I like this because it ingrains in people’s heads that when they hear Trelix they should think McAfee, to make that connection. Like with Xfinity, they don’t want that connection made, they want people thinking “Oh I don’t have that crappy Comcast service, I have Xfinity”. I’ll be saying it this way to show people that they’re the same thing
fair point, maybe I’ll do that from now on
Or Evri, the brand formerly known as Hermes
lol@ this. My bet what is actually happening: cost cutting or future nitro feature.
Trying to keep those classified documents on the DL for home grown radical terror.
It’s an annoying change for anyone using discord to share files outside of it’s closed platform but doesn’t affect most people.
I wonder whether bridges for matrix have to be fixed or if they’re already editing messages bridged to matrix to the new url.
Depends on how it’s implemented. Anyone using a “media proxy” will see their discord bridged media probably fail to load (outside of possible caches) after a day. Anyone who has their bridge configured to reupload discord media to their homeserver should see no change.
What is this bridge you speak of? I’m intrigued. Does matrix have a functionality that lets you run a mirror of a discord channel?
Yes, but you have to selfhost your own instance. Big servers don’t have that, and the ones that have probably require payment.
You don’t.
Here is a free bridge bot that will do it for you
Yes exactly. The bridge logs into the discord server as a user. Then it mirrors all chats from your user in matrix to the discord.
Oh matrix, every user on the connected server gets a user whose name is their snowflake. Those virtual users post into the matrix server whatever their respective discord users posts.
One of these four.
Honestly, I’m okay with this at least until they fix the fact that all shared files are accessible without authentication. Granted, you still had to get the link before downloading an uploaded file, but the fact that there was no authentication required to download a file uploaded to Discord was pretty surprising.
And a LOT risky
It’s probably also way cheaper to do it that way. As far as I could tell when I checked in on it some time ago, most of the content goes through a Cloudflare proxy straight to a GCP S3-compatible bucket.
You still need to know magical numbers to download file.
What is a password? A string of characters. What is a link? A string of characters.
If you make it long enough, it’ll be impossible to guess one.
Your files are safe
I always thought it was a bad idea for people to treat Discord as a free CDN.
I mean it worked for long enough 🤷♂️
If its going away now, it isn’t quite long enough…
I don’t care what you say, Discord is terrible.
It’s just like IRC but with privacy violations and ads!
More like Mumble, but with privacy violations and ads
And without an ability to host the network yourself!
This is… annoying. I get the intent for malware, but honestly it’s a BS reason. The content will just be uploaded elsewhere. But what this will do is drastically lower their storage cost under the guise of… not even user safety, more “slightly inconveniencing malware writers.”
Yes, it’ll be uploaded elsewhere. That’s the whole point.
Discord doesn’t want to host any of this data, they don’t want to be connected to criminal activity. It makes sense.
Also, while it might slightly lower their storage costs (if the hackers move elsewhere), if you send a file to someone, it’ll still stay on Discord’s servers. Only difference is the link to said file - it’ll only be valid for a day, and then you’ll have to use a new one (in a way that’s probably transparent to the user)
The goal here is to make it difficult to link to things uploaded to discord from outside of discord. The malware reason is BS. If they wanted to curb malware it would be as easy as making it a nitro feature. What that doesn’t fix is all the people piggybacking on discord as a free CDN.
Discord isn’t even wrong for doing this. I just resent their dishonesty.
Not sure rolling it into Nitro would be worth the effort, I’d consider that quite complex personally
Interesting news but I don’t really get how this is self-hosted?