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[IP] It seems that even "secure" financial transactions with Internet Explorer aren't safe





Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim Bishop <geodog@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 6, 2004 4:56:09 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: dgillmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: It seems that even "secure" financial transactions with Internet Explorer aren't safe

 Dave,

 For IP if you want:

The latest exploit is a file called "img1big.gif" that decompresses into a malevolent Browser Helper Object (BHO) that captures your financial transactions. According to a report from SANS (http://isc.incidents.org/diary.php?date=2004-06-29), this BHO:


"watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries. When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to http://www.refestltd.com/cgi-bin/yes.pl and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location." There are only two choices left with IE: Either don't browse the web with it, or don't use it for financial transactions.

Thank goodness there are choices like Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/), Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) and Opera (http://www.opera.com/), for those of us still chained to Windows.


 Thanks,
 Tim Bishop

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