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Friday, January 30, 2004 #

Now We're Not Supposed To Click HyperLinks!?
I saw a lot of blog posts and media coverage on this -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;833786

And at first, I have to admit that I rolled my eyes and thought, "Geez, when will we ever learn." Then I saw an e-mail from a good friend of mine whom I respect a great deal. He was pretty shocked (and annoyed) as well - "I mean, come on. Computers are supposed to make our lives easier. The internet is supposed to speed things up. Reverting back to manual entry for URLs is just plain dumb!" This guy is one of the smartest people I know - and when it comes to "which product is best" is always fair. (Even if he has a slight propensity for the penguin!) It encouraged me to investigate things a little more...

So I read the knowledgebase article - from start to finish - instead of just going by the short snipets that have been included with the coverage that I have seen. Aside from the fact that this knowledgebase article is completely inappropriate for the casual computer user (far too technical, guys, come on!) I don't believe it's one of those situations where we should be quick to criticize. I'm not drunk on the "Kool-Aid" - I promise. Keep Reading.

What this article describes is not a vulnerability in IE in my opinion - there's more than enough of those to go around, though. I'll grant you that. It describes a "spoofing" attack where a malicious person misrepresents the actual website that a user thinks they are visiting. This isn't unique to IE, folks. A person using Safari, Netscape, Mozilla or Opera might fall for the same trick. It's industry standard URLs and HTML. So, here I am sticking up for IE - for those of you who were reading on waiting for me to do something like this, I'm more than willing to do it. I just don't think it's deserved this time.

It's frustrating that the media chooses to sell newspapers and drive traffic to websites rather than accurately and fairly relating the facts. That's why they call it reporting, anyway, isn't it? But then again, we're all capitalists here, aren't we?  Juicy headlines and "IE sucks" stories generate clicks.

I own a Mac and sometimes use Safari. I use (and have used) various flavors of Linux, so I'm familar with Mozilla. I even have Firebird installed on this Windows XP system right now. However, I'm no expert by any means. Am I missing some sort of silver bullet that these browsers contain that would protect the casual user from an attack like this? If so, shame on us for not having built it into the product. If not, we need to find one. 55,000 smart people work at Microsoft - 54,999 including me - someone should be able to find an answer.

But in fairness to all, I do have to admit - "manually typing the URL in the address bar" is a pretty lame suggestion, isn't it!? Could you imagine typing "http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5Bln%5D;833786" every time you wanted to look up the aforementioned article? I'd probably give up and switch too. Let's hope it doesn't come to that...
posted @ 7:54 PM