codyg1985’s Think Tank

You think that copying text off of a web page is innocent, that no one knows what you copyed.  You’d be wrong thanks to one line of JavaScript that could be emedded in a webpage.

JavaScript is a powerful language that is used with HTML to generate a webpage.  JavaScript brings access of many different browser elements to a web developer.  Such elements could be the width of the window, the position of text on a webpage, or whether or not you have the mouse cursor over a link.  Unfortunately, JavaScript can also be used to keep track of what you type and save it for use later.

In this example, JavaScript is used to store whatever information is on the Windows Clipboard, the area that everything that you perform the copy operation on goes.  The code takes the text that is inside the Windows clipboard, regardless of whether or not that text was gathered inside a browser window, and stores it as a variable.  Once that text becomes a JavaScript variable, it can be maniuplated, read, or sent anywhere.

So, next time you copy and paste a password or a credit card number, be aware that someone else could have gotten that information just by stumbling onto your Windows Clipboard.