What does " oscrashed.xyz " do to a computer?

Question

I mistyped an URL into chrome and it redirected me to the site: oscrashed.xyz

It appeared to be the typical scam site that asks you to call a number to get your computer unlocked or cleaned of viruses. But after a while, it causes my entire system to freeze (not just chrome).

I had to do a hard reboot to get control back. I launched system monitor, and visited the website again, with the process ID in mind in order to stop chrome from the shell. It appears that the site just uses 100% of the CPU, but I still managed to send the kill -STOP signal to chrome; despite that, the computer still froze after a few seconds.

I don't have the skill set to investigate how the website accomplishes this. Can someone take a look at it, or point me to the right direction on how to look into this?

Thanks.

I'm running Linux (Centos 7.2)

Most of this answer applies to you too: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/128178/72031 — Bob Ortiz, Aug 10 '16 at 18:09
Could be an exploit that was executed against the browsers plugins. From there a malware was run. — Dan Frman, Aug 10 '16 at 17:59

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 16 '20 at 09:49

It appears that this website loads a lot of new pages in the browser, as you can see from the source code:

<script type='text/javascript'> window.location.href = 'chrm'; </script>

A quick look at the source code and a scan by VirusTotal don't show any other malicious activity, so you're probably safe, but you might consider an antivirus scan just for extra safety.

There are other, similar webpages designed to crash Chrome and other browsers, including Safari, as this article states:

The website is http: // crashsafari.com. Please be responsible with this information and do not send it to anyone as a joke.

By its name, it sounds like a way to target Apple's browser only, but Chrome and Firefox are impacted too. On my Ubuntu laptop, running Chrome, the entire browser froze. I had to force close it in order to continue. Some Chrome on Windows users report that only that tab crashes.[...] While it can be argued that this is nothing more than a prank-worthy nuisance, remember -- some people work exclusively in the browser. This could result in important work being lost. Rebooting an iOS device entirely can cause a ton of lost app data.

What does " oscrashed.xyz " do to a computer?

1 Answers1