HTML5 Exploit Can Allow Websites To Fill Up Your Hard Drive

Browsing websites on the Internet could be a great experience, depending on what kind of content you’re searching for. Conducting research for a term paper may not be as rewarding as browsing Reddit, but the process is still the same: input a website address, get to said website. But a recently revealed HTML5 exploit shows some websites can fill your computer’s hard drive with junk data. A lot of junk data.

Web developer Feross Aboukhadijeh created FillDisk.com in order to demonstrate the exploit in HTML5. The Web Storage standard used in HTML5 allows any website to place large amounts of data on your computer’s drive, which could result in a lot of frustration as the user will probably continually wonder why their hard drives are completely out of disk space.

Web browsers have the ability to limit just how much space websites can dump onto your hard drive, with Mozilla Firefox being able to intelligently know how much a website should be loading onto the hard disk at a time. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Opera currently have no storage limits, although we hope now that this exploit has been publicized, the developers of these web browsers would look into patching their software so our computer hard disks can stay from being clogged up with junk data.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkScSMIr_00&feature=player_embedded