Facebook ignores huge security hole for four months Facebook has been sitting on a nasty website flaw that for four months has made its users susceptible to malware and forgery attacks. The cross-site scripting (XSS) error can be plainly demonstrated here and here. It allows a miscreant to trick a user into believing he is visiting Facebook when the vast majority of the content …
The NoScript plugin can't help you with any Facebook security vulnerabilities... To use Facebook, you need Javascript, so you need Facebook whitelisted in the NoScript configuration. Because it's whitelisted, you are now vulnerable to any XSS attacks, because XSS vulnerabilities usually mean injecting Javascript into files that are sourced from Facebook. So, either you use Facebook, and are vulnerable whether you have NoScript installed or not, or you don't use Facebook, in which case you don't need NoScript to protect you.
NoScript is able to distinguish XSS from JavaScript running locally. Its XSS filter even remains active when you allow js globally. For example embedded Youtude vids are blocked until you explicitly allow them.
And *everybody* should use NoScript -- XSS attacks are very common, and malicious js is not just limited to obscure corners of the web. Even big sites get compromised sometimes.
I tried using NoScript. I love the idea of it in principal. Unfortunately half an hour of using it will made me realise how much of the web depends on Javascript. The majority of sites I visited were completely broken and I have to keep whitelisting things to the point that it seemed utterly pointless.
If pretty much breaking the entire Internet is your idea of a fix then I'd rather be broken. Here's a similar fix: Turn off your computer.
I went back to using Flashblock instead.
I'd love it if Javascript wasn't used so (IMO) gratuitously. (It's used wonderfully on many sites but on others, where you're being served a static page, it makes me wonder WTF the site authors were thinking.) If I only had to whitelist a few sites, like I do with Flashblock, then NoScript would be great. Having to whitelist a huge number of sites is a giant hassle and makes me question what I'm protecting myself from when so many things are granted an exception.
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