[TechBro8615]

Also note that as far as the sketchiness scale goes, this is basically a 5/10. Now consider the same tools in the hands of malware distributors. For example, I've seen these anti-debugger techniques on NFL piracy websites when I tried to investigate why my CPU was pinned to 100% while I was streaming the game.

[codetrotter]

> I've seen these anti-debugger techniques on NFL piracy websites when I tried to investigate why my CPU was pinned to 100% while I was streaming the game

Probably safe to assume they were mining cryptocurrency with your browser while you were watching the stream.

[TechBro8615]

Probably. I got distracted by the game so I never found out. And I only visit those websites when I'm watching a stream anyway. Really it's quite a clever distribution vector, since it involves long sessions and any experts in the audience will be too distracted to look too deeply, or at least unmotivated to investigate and publish research against a site that helps them watch the games they want to watch. It's a symbiotic relationship in a way...

I did notice the ad serving infrastructure seemed quite sophisticated. There were so many domains and proxies and redirects. Luckily uBlock Origin blocks almost all of them. And usually, I can avoid any of the "bonus" features by opening the video player iframe in its own tab (but sometimes this isn't possible, or the video player tab has some scripts to make it annoying to run in isolation).

One thing I like to do during the commercial breaks is paste the URL of the site into GitHub Code Search. This always leads to interesting results, including blocklists, people's personal media scrapers, or sometimes even the (re-)publishing infrastructure of the sites themselves. It's also a great way to find alternative URLs or other streaming sites.