Security: the dangers of copying and pasting R code

[This article was first published on R – Why?, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Most of the time when we stumble across a code snippet online, we often blindly copy and paste it into the R console. I suspect almost everyone does this. After all, what’s the harm? Consider this simple piece of R code that performs simple linear regression

# Generate data
x = rnorm(10)
y = rnorm(10)
message(“All your base are belong to us.”)
# Simple linear regression 
m = lm(y ~ x)

Now highlight the above piece of R code and copy and paste it into your console; look carefully at what you’ve pasted. A new line has magically appeared.

# Generate data
x = rnorm(10)
y = rnorm(10)
message("All your base are belong to us.")
# Simple linear regression
m = lm(y ~ x)

Due to some sneaky CSS magic, I was able to hide the message() statement. If I was evil, I could have changed this to a system, source, or any other command.

The CSS code simply sets the message() function to the background color, changes the font size and makes it un-selectable (see this post for details).

So remember, be careful with your copy and pasting!


To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R – Why?.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)