[4660] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Big IE hole
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marcus Fredriksson)
Wed Mar 5 06:57:42 1997
Date: Wed, 05 Mar 1997 11:15:06 +0100
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
From: marcusf@innovative.se (Marcus Fredriksson)
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
One more thing, though:
When you click on a .lnk hyperlink, IE asks you if you want to "save it to
disk" or just "open it". You also have an option to disable this question
for this type of links. The correct answer here to avoid the link to be
executed is "save to disk". One can of course press the CANCEL button to do
nothing.
IMHO, the issue here is: What if you answer wrong to this question? My
first reaction when I saw it was: "Save to disk? Heck, no!!" But then I
realized that open it wouldn't be a such a great idea either, because if
you do, it executes.
So what about the "ordinary" user? Can we expect him/her to answer
correctly? I don't think so.
The solution to this is to completely disable hyperlinks pointing to .lnk
and .url files, as Netscape (I think) did with the AUX and COM prefixes.
Regards,
Marcus
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