Allow me to be somewhat incendiary and clear: as a programmer and as a hardcore techie for more than 10 years, a good many of those years being directly involved with people who have made viruses, there is absolutely positively no “virus” on the Drudge Report, and the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, Terrance W. Gainer, has no idea what he is talking about. Senator Inhofe is entirely correct.
After the jump I’ll go into specific detail as to my research into the site, but suffice to say there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever there is a virus, and it is virtually impossible to pass on a virus through a website. Further, there is no reason why a good virus programmer would ever bother putting a virus on the Drudge Report to hunt out politicians. Gainer likely got confused based upon the nature of a “tracking cookie”. For my complete analysis, click below.
Requisite details:
The only active scripting active on the Drudge Report is a series of Javascript files, predominantly those linked to Intermarkets.net. Intermarkets.net is an advertising company that Drudge likely uses in order to monetize his site. You can easily see these advertisements by turning off adblock- a quick check on my end revealed an ad for Lime-Away and Asian brides, among other things. Other than that, only two blocks of Javascript exist- an auto-reloading script in the header (which I find personally annoying), and an eProof.com (probably this) javascript system that displays headlines, archives, and other sorts of related stuff. Basically, the only things of notes are a bunch of iFrames with a bunch of ads in them so Matt Drudge can eat.
Further, the implication that Matt Drudge could pass a virus through his poorly coded mess of a site is hilarious at best. Even the oldest of browsers are fairly strong so far as security is concerned (IE withstanding), and it’s not really possible to “pass a virus” through a website in such a laissez-fare manner. Indeed, it would make much more sense of Drudge was using some complex flash scripts, AJAX, or something that was sufficiently convoluted to raise eyebrows and require in-depth code examination, but he isn’t. Drudge is still technologically stuck in 1995. He hasn’t even figured out HTML color, for the most part.
Finally, I think it’s a little ridiculous one would presume a virus-maker would use the Drudge Report. Most talented people who create legitimate viruses create dummy sites and lure people in to get their credit card numbers, not target random politicos and politically active Republicans, both of which likely do not have the honeypot of data most would be hunting for. Even if it was just a malicious virus, one could be much more effective on another site. It simply does not make sense.
My prediction? Gainer likely has some sort of firewall/virus protection software on his computer, saw it freaked out over the tracking cookie likely passed by Intermarkets, and then decided he would play technology superhero and e-mail the warning out to the masses. Tracking cookies are all too common flagged by antivirus software as a form of a “virus” because of the way in which they pass information, which is really kind of a disputable definition, and one that raises unnecessary panic by the masses.
In any case, if they were really worried, we could start making all politicians browse the web using Lynx.
Tags: ads, drudge report, house, html, Politics, programming, republicans, senate, Technology, virus, web 2.0, web development
