this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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"Attackers, Trellix wrote, use the platform’s webhooks to pull data from victims’ computers and drop it into Discord channels run by the attackers."

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always thought it was a bad idea for people to treat Discord as a free CDN.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean it worked for long enough 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

If its going away now, it isn't quite long enough...

[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is… annoying. I get the intent for malware, but honestly it’s a BS reason. The content will just be uploaded elsewhere. But what this will do is drastically lower their storage cost under the guise of… not even user safety, more “slightly inconveniencing malware writers.”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, it'll be uploaded elsewhere. That's the whole point.

Discord doesn't want to host any of this data, they don't want to be connected to criminal activity. It makes sense.

Also, while it might slightly lower their storage costs (if the hackers move elsewhere), if you send a file to someone, it'll still stay on Discord's servers. Only difference is the link to said file - it'll only be valid for a day, and then you'll have to use a new one (in a way that's probably transparent to the user)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The goal here is to make it difficult to link to things uploaded to discord from outside of discord. The malware reason is BS. If they wanted to curb malware it would be as easy as making it a nitro feature. What that doesn't fix is all the people piggybacking on discord as a free CDN.

Discord isn't even wrong for doing this. I just resent their dishonesty.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not sure rolling it into Nitro would be worth the effort, I'd consider that quite complex personally

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wonder if McAfee changing their name to Trellix to escape how much the general public hates them will work better than Comcast rebranding as Xfinity.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

The general public doesn't hate McAfee that much, so I'd bet it'll work. Heck, I work in IT and I didn't even know about the rebrand (mostly because I engage with McAfee as little as possible).

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

probably about as well as Twitter becoming "X, formerly known as Twitter"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah let's keep that going here. From here on our whenever I see Trelix I will say "Trelix, the brand fomally known as McAfee."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Or Evri, the brand formerly known as Hermes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

or just call them mcafee, twitter, facebook, etc

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, but I like this because it ingrains in people's heads that when they hear Trelix they should think McAfee, to make that connection. Like with Xfinity, they don't want that connection made, they want people thinking "Oh I don't have that crappy Comcast service, I have Xfinity". I'll be saying it this way to show people that they're the same thing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

fair point, maybe I'll do that from now on

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

lol@ this. My bet what is actually happening: cost cutting or future nitro feature.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't care what you say, Discord is terrible.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's just like IRC but with privacy violations and ads!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

More like Mumble, but with privacy violations and ads

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

And without an ability to host the network yourself!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's an annoying change for anyone using discord to share files outside of it's closed platform but doesn't affect most people.

I wonder whether bridges for matrix have to be fixed or if they're already editing messages bridged to matrix to the new url.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends on how it's implemented. Anyone using a "media proxy" will see their discord bridged media probably fail to load (outside of possible caches) after a day. Anyone who has their bridge configured to reupload discord media to their homeserver should see no change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What is this bridge you speak of? I'm intrigued. Does matrix have a functionality that lets you run a mirror of a discord channel?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, but you have to selfhost your own instance. Big servers don't have that, and the ones that have probably require payment.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, but you have to selfhost your own instance.

You don't.

Here is a free bridge bot that will do it for you

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes exactly. The bridge logs into the discord server as a user. Then it mirrors all chats from your user in matrix to the discord.

Oh matrix, every user on the connected server gets a user whose name is their snowflake. Those virtual users post into the matrix server whatever their respective discord users posts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly, I'm okay with this at least until they fix the fact that all shared files are accessible without authentication. Granted, you still had to get the link before downloading an uploaded file, but the fact that there was no authentication required to download a file uploaded to Discord was pretty surprising.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's probably also way cheaper to do it that way. As far as I could tell when I checked in on it some time ago, most of the content goes through a Cloudflare proxy straight to a GCP S3-compatible bucket.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And a LOT risky

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You still need to know magical numbers to download file.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

What is a password? A string of characters. What is a link? A string of characters.

If you make it long enough, it'll be impossible to guess one.

Your files are safe

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Interesting news but I don't really get how this is self-hosted?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Trying to keep those classified documents on the DL for home grown radical terror.