From: Raoul Nakhmanson-Kulish (raoulelforsoft.com)
Date: Thu May 19 2005 - 01:02:31 CDT

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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
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