There’s a sufficient prevalence of spyware, ransomware, and other malware being delivered via compromised, or malicious, websites for me to think that journalists covering black hat issues should check to see that the the website is clean before propagating the link. Given the number of vectors that any given website might try to exploit (browsers, plug-ins, Flash, Java, etc. for each OS), it seems likely that a not insignificant number of readers of a publication as popular as The Guardian would have an unpatched vector. And, if news orgs are going to do the work to check that the site is clean, it seems little additional work to include that in the reporting.
Not everyone stays fully patched. My grandmom still calls me every time iOS asks her to agree to updated terms and conditions. le sigh
I don’t know that. (dude you are blowing your own cover, your supposed to be all incognito and stuff).
