It's definitely no Konami code.
Most of you are likely to be running one of the most recent versions of your browser of choice, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari; so hopefully this little bug won't take your browser down.
It's been discovered and now popularly reported that Internet Explorer 6 can be crashed by simply pointing the browser to:
Those without IE6 still lingering in their systems can get a demonstration of what happens in the video below.
KrebsonSecurity explains that this bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE6 and the crash does not appear to work in newer versions of the browser.
Interestingly, it seems that this bug was found and reported to Microsoft back in 2004, but has yet to be patched. At the time, Microsoft engineers supposed believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, leaving it a fix for a service pack – but that fix never arrived.
While the true damage of this flaw isn't severe, it could still cause many annoyances if malware (or a prankster) were to change the default start page to "ms-its:%F0:", rendering the browser unusable without a more advanced registry tweak.
*www.tomshardware.com/news/internet-explorer-ie6-crash-bug,9592.html
pity to those who still uses IE6 - but the most surprising thing is M$ has not fixed that bug since 2004 and they have provided this unsafe and buggy browser even with SP3.
Most of you are likely to be running one of the most recent versions of your browser of choice, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari; so hopefully this little bug won't take your browser down.
It's been discovered and now popularly reported that Internet Explorer 6 can be crashed by simply pointing the browser to:
Code:
ms-its:%F0:Those without IE6 still lingering in their systems can get a demonstration of what happens in the video below.
KrebsonSecurity explains that this bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE6 and the crash does not appear to work in newer versions of the browser.
Interestingly, it seems that this bug was found and reported to Microsoft back in 2004, but has yet to be patched. At the time, Microsoft engineers supposed believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, leaving it a fix for a service pack – but that fix never arrived.
While the true damage of this flaw isn't severe, it could still cause many annoyances if malware (or a prankster) were to change the default start page to "ms-its:%F0:", rendering the browser unusable without a more advanced registry tweak.
*www.tomshardware.com/news/internet-explorer-ie6-crash-bug,9592.html
pity to those who still uses IE6 - but the most surprising thing is M$ has not fixed that bug since 2004 and they have provided this unsafe and buggy browser even with SP3.
