Screencastify, a popular Chrome extension for capturing and sharing videos from websites, was recently found to be vulnerable to a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that allowed arbitrary websites to dupe people into unknowingly activating their webcams.

A miscreant taking advantage of this flaw could then download the resulting video from the victim's Google Drive account.

Software developer Wladimir Palant, co-founder of ad amelioration biz Eyeo, published a blog post about his findings on Monday. He said he reported the XSS bug in February, and Screencastify's developers fixed it within a day.

But Palant contends the browser extension continues to pose a risk because the code trusts multiple partner subdomains, and an XSS flaw on any one of those sites could potentially be misused to attack Screencastify users.

The Screencastify page on the Chrome Web Store says that the browser extension has more than 10 million users, which is the maximum value listed by store metrics. As Palant points out, the extension is aimed at the education market, raising some unpleasant possibilities.

"The extension grants screencastify.com enough privileges to record a video via user’s webcam and get the result," he explains in his post. "No user interaction is required, and there are only minimal visual indicators of what’s going on. It’s even possible to cover your tracks: remove the video from Google Drive and use another message to close the extension tab opened after the recording."

What's concerning about this is that the extension code gives several other domains these same privileges: not just Screencastify, via the app.screencastify.com domain, but also Webflow, Teachable, Atlassian, Netlify, Marketo, ZenDesk, and Pendo, each via Screencastify subdomains.

And, Palant says, neither the Screencastify domain or the subdomains delegated to partners have meaningful Content Security Policy protection – a way to mitigate XSS risks.

Palant's proof-of-concept exploit involved finding an XSS bug within the Screencastify code, which wasn't a particularly difficult task because they're quite common. The NIST database lists almost 20,000 of them from 2001 to the present. According to OWASP, "XSS is the second most prevalent issue in the OWASP Top 10, and is found in around two thirds of all applications."

Palant found an XSS bug on an error page that gets presented when a user tries to submit a video after already submitting one for an assignment. The page contained a “View on Classroom” button that sent the user to Google Classroom using this code:

"It’s a query string parameter," Palant explains in his post. "Is there some link validation in between? Nope. So, if the query string parameter is something like javascript:alert(document.domain), will clicking this button run JavaScript code in the context of the screencastify.com domain? It sure will!"

To make that happen, the attacker would still need to trick the victim into clicking on this button. But as Palant observed, the page contained no protection against framing, meaning it was susceptible to clickjacking. So his proof-of-concept attack did just that, loading the vulnerable page in an invisible frame and positioning it under the mouse cursor so any click would be passed through to the hidden button.

Thereafter, the page could message Screencastify to fetch the victim's Google access token and ask Google for the user's identity. It could also list Google Drive contents or start a recording session.

Palant said he reported the issue on February 14, 2022, and his message was acknowledged the same day. A day later, the XSS on the error page was fixed. The message he received also mentioned a long-term plan to implement Content Security Policy protection, but as of May 23, according to Palant, that hasn't happened on app.screencastify.com nor www.screencastify.com, apart from the addition of framing protection.

The API, he observed, does not appear to have been restricted and will still produce a Google OAuth token that can be used to access a victim's Google Drive, Palant said. So too is the onConnectExternal handler that lets websites start video recordings.

The Register asked Google whether it would care to comment on Palant's observation that Google Drive access is too broadly scoped, but we've not heard back.

"So, the question whether to keep using Screencastify at this point boils down to whether you trust Screencastify, Pendo, Webflow, Teachable, Atlassian, Netlify, Marketo and ZenDesk with access to your webcam and your Google Drive data," he concludes. "And whether you trust all of these parties to keep their web properties free of XSS vulnerabilities. If not, you should uninstall Screencastify ASAP."

Screencastify did not immediately respond to a call and email messages seeking comment. ®

Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.

That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.

The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.

America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance. 

A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. 

Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.

Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.

A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."

The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.

A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.

The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.

Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.

Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.

"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.

HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.

Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.

Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.

HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.

The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.

However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.

This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.

The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.

Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.

According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.

During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."

Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.

This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.

"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.

GitHub has revealed it stored a "number of plaintext user credentials for the npm registry" in internal logs following the integration of the JavaScript package registry into GitHub's logging systems.

The information came to light when the company today published the results of its investigation into April's unrelated OAuth token theft attack, where it described how an attacker grabbed data including the details of approximately 100,000 npm users.

The code shack went on to assure users that the relevant log files had not been leaked in any data breach; that it had improved the log cleanup; and that it removed the logs in question "prior to the attack on npm."

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