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January 31, 2004
Click-free Web Surfing
Microsoft makes some pretty incredible products.
[Please excuse me while I find a bucket to catch my dripping sarcasm.]
Anyway, Microsoft makes some products, most of which do what you want them to do and a lot more. Some of them also do things you don't want them to do and usually without your knowledge.
Let's test your knowledge. Did you know about this one:
There is a flaw in Internet Explorer--not the margin thing I was grousing about earlier--where a URL can be faked or "spoofed" to make it appear that you are on one site while actually being on another. This flaw was reported at least as early as the first week of December. An exploit was making the rounds very soon thereafter, prevailing upon the recipient to verify personal information on Paypal.com. The site the victim entered such information was actually based in a Eastern European country.
This week, Microsoft indicated it would do something to fix the problem. Maybe. Whatever, it's not done yet, but something will be done.
The kicker, though, is this KnowledgeBase article on their support site. In it, they make such incredible claims as "the most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself."
As a responsible computer professional, I would like to say that if you are reduced to manually typing each URL you wanted to visit in a browser, then that browser has failed you miserably in its implied feature set. The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is to use a browser that isn't susceptible to the exploit.
Pick one:
Apple Safari (Mac OS X only)
Mozilla (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and many many others)
Mozilla Firebird (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
Mozilla Camino (Mac OS X only)
Opera (Windows, Linux, Mac OS, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, QNX, BeOS, Smartphone/PDA)
As a side note, most--if not all--of these browsers offer built-in pop-up blockers. Unlike Internet Explorer. Plus, you'd get to see my new layout without the ire that I will direct at all the Internet Explorer on Windows users in a fit of displaced anger.
Posted by KinCross at January 31, 2004 12:25 AM