Posted:
Hackers can turn your mouse against you
There used to be a time when you could take certain things for granted. When you put your mouse over a link on a Web page, and the Web address showed up in your status bar, you'd expect the link to take you there. These days, even that is not the case anymore.
reports a problem in IE in which a link you hover over with your mouse appear legitimate in the status bar. If you right-click such a link and open its Properties dialog box, a legitimate URL appears there, too. Despite this, the link would actually go to a completely different page. This could fool you into landing on a hacker site, which could steal your personal information or try other hacker tricks.
SecurityFocus has available that could easily be cut and pasted into a live Web page. I gave them a try myself, and found the exploit easy to setup.
While I was testing these things, I received a security warning from IE 6 SP2 browser when the page loaded. This version of IE was intelligent enough to know something was up, but all I had to do was dismiss the warning and the exploits worked like a charm.
What to do: The discovery of this is pretty new. The best suggestion I have, if you must use IE to visit random Web sites, is to follow the IE hardening guidelines detailed in the , issue of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. This should minimize the risk of this problem.
For more information and updates on this IE vulnerability, check out the at SecuerityFocus.
There used to be a time when you could take certain things for granted. When you put your mouse over a link on a Web page, and the Web address showed up in your status bar, you'd expect the link to take you there. These days, even that is not the case anymore.
reports a problem in IE in which a link you hover over with your mouse appear legitimate in the status bar. If you right-click such a link and open its Properties dialog box, a legitimate URL appears there, too. Despite this, the link would actually go to a completely different page. This could fool you into landing on a hacker site, which could steal your personal information or try other hacker tricks.
SecurityFocus has available that could easily be cut and pasted into a live Web page. I gave them a try myself, and found the exploit easy to setup.
While I was testing these things, I received a security warning from IE 6 SP2 browser when the page loaded. This version of IE was intelligent enough to know something was up, but all I had to do was dismiss the warning and the exploits worked like a charm.
What to do: The discovery of this is pretty new. The best suggestion I have, if you must use IE to visit random Web sites, is to follow the IE hardening guidelines detailed in the , issue of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. This should minimize the risk of this problem.
For more information and updates on this IE vulnerability, check out the at SecuerityFocus.