The Stagecoach Hack

StagecoachHack

The Stagecoach Hack was inspired by this quotation:

"Plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way 
to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk 
advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even sprang in the fucking middle) 
all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd 
somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in 
Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, 
twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself." 
-- Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age, pg 39


Technically, the Stagecoach Hack is based on the ability to control an HTML page 
from the browser console or by injecting Javascript into the page. 
Injecting a line like:

    document.body.innerHTML = ''

will completely make a page disappear and the hacker could then input anything they 
want onto the page. However, completely replacing the content of page would defeintely 
alert the viewer that something strange has happened.


The Stagecoach Hack in jQuery:

    $('body').html($('<iframe>').attr('src',window.location));
    $('iframe').css({height:'100%',width:'100%'});

One could then overlay the original HTML with additional content:

    $('body').append($('<h1 style="position:absolute;top:0;">').html('Yo'));