full-disclosure - Security issue in Microsoft Outlook

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Date: Thu May 19 07:02:52 2005
From: raoul at elforsoft.com (Raoul Nakhmanson-Kulish)
Subject: Security issue in Microsoft Outlook

Hello, Bakchodiya!

On 19.05.2005 0:27 you wrote:

> Lets compose an email in MS Outlook, lets type
> http://www.cybertrion.com & put a space after it to
> make it a link. Now put your cursor just before
> cybertrion & type any URL for eg: 
> http://www.foo-labs.info now send it to anyone. The
> receiver will see the URL as http://www.foo-labs.info
> but when he clicks on it it will directly take him to
> http://www.cybertrion.com
> I am not sure how critical this is but it can fool
> alot of people & result in download of a virus.
This "bug" is a standard feature of HTML (including, of course, HTML 
messages): you may specify any URL in <a href="..."> regardless of link 
text. This is a wide-spreaded trick for phishing, and you haven't 
discovered the America ;)

But at the same time Outlook (prior to 2003) really is more vulnerable 
than some other mail clients because it doesn't show a real link URL to 
user. Outlook 2003 shows an URL as a tooltip but after short delay, and 
some impatient users may be phished.

I prefer to use Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird, it shows a real URL in status 
bar instantly and moreover has a phishing detection algorithm (Mozilla 
bug #279191). Especially I like a "View -> Message body as -> Simple 
HTML" feature which removes any little bit danger HTML tags and 
attributes from message before showing it but saves hypertext logical 
formatting.

-- 
Regards,
Raoul Nakhmanson-Kulish,
Elfor Soft Ltd.,
IT Department