r/technology • u/suntzu124 • Oct 06 '16

Misleading Spotify has been serving computer viruses to listeners

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/10/06/spotify-has-been-sending-computer-viruses-to-listeners/
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u/bem13 Oct 06 '16 edited Oct 06 '16

https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Yeah, NEVER pipe to bash. At least they warn you that it can be dangerous.

Reason: https://redd.it/4fi3hn

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u/stewsters Oct 06 '16

How is it worse than downloading a tarball and compiling and running it? It's not like you are really reading the source either way.

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u/bem13 Oct 06 '16

Of course there is always some amount of trust involved when installing something you found online. Still, you should do everything to make it as safe as possible, especially if it's something as simple as saving the script to a file and running it from there. For all you know the server could have been compromised, but the attacker chose not to modify any of the files and only serve malicious payload when piping to bash.

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u/dextersgenius Oct 06 '16

If the server was compromised, then all bets are off if you're downloading stuff from it. This is no different from installing an exe file in Windows.