Basically title, curious as I know this had been brought up a while ago but never really followed up on the topic

    • BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      They are just more likely to be scam like, particularly since they can be assumed to be a file at a glance.

      Even more deviously, crafty urls like this further hides what you are actually doing, like this:

      https://github.com∕kubernetes∕kubernetes∕archive∕refs∕tags∕@v1271.zip

      Hover it with your cursor, watch what that actually links too, no markup cheating involved. Anything before the @ is just user information. Imagine clicking that and thinking you downlodaed a tagged build, only to get a malware?

      It’s not the end of the world, but as a developer it makes great sense to just auto-block it to avoid an incident. The above URL is from this article, which says it’s not as big of huge problem too:

      https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/google_zip_mov_domains/

      But it’s kind of a death by a thousand cuts to me, because it’s another thing with another set of consideration accross the internet ecosystem that one will have to deal with.

    • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Software that creates hyperlinks whenever it finds text that might be a URL, combined with ubiquitous use of .zip extension for compressed files.

      • Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        Are there any exploits that have ever made use of TLD <-> file extension confusion? This seems really unlikely to help pull off an attack, even if the TLD was .exe, but maybe I’m overly optimistic.