Tuesday, 10th October 2017
The Absurdly Underestimated Dangers of CSV Injection. This is horrifying. A plain old CSV file intended for import into Excel can embed formulas (a value prefixed with an equals symbol) which can execute system commands—with a big honking security prompt that most people will likely ignore. Even worse: they can embed IMPORTXML() functions that can silently leak data from the rest of the sheet to an external URL—and those will work against Google Sheets as well as Excel.
Changelogs to help understand the fires in the North Bay
The situation in the counties north of San Francisco is horrifying right now. I’ve repurposed some of the tools I built to for the Irma Response project last month to collect and track some data that might be of use to anyone trying to understand what’s happening up there. I’m sharing these now in the hope that they might prove useful.
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