Have you really never heard of malware from JavaScript? Buffer overflows and sandbox escapes are almost all JavaScript, still, hasn't changed in the last decade. Sometimes it's a random font parser library or something, but almost always it's JavaScript. And now that browsers are auto-updating and they have fully staffed security teams behind them that get word of a vulnerability being secretly exploited before the general public, most people don't get hit just because they browsed to a random website. But it's still possible, and especially likely that a shady torrent site could be hosting malware or get ""hacked"".