Saturday, March 5, 2011

Microsoft implores you: please stop using Internet Explorer 6

Outdated and dangerous but if you are still using it then we have some tips on how to make it crash forever

Microsoft wants you to stop using Internet Explorer 6. It's got a site, ie6countdown showing you how badly we're doing in terms of using its horrendously old, buggy, security-lapsed browser: the worst country in terms of usage turns out to be China (and the country with the largest number of bot-infected PCs is..?).

There are plenty of other browsers: Microsoft has a bunch of them (choose between IE8 and the newer in-beta IE9), and of course there's Firefox, and Safari, and Opera, and..

However if you happen to be cursed for some reason with IE6 and would like to be able to complain to IT (they must have made you use it, right?) that it keeps crashing and you need a new browser, here's all you need to do.

Either:
click this link

or

Set the home page to
ms-its:%F0:

(the penultimate character is a zero.)

Thanks to Brian Krebs for the self-destruct links, which he says he was told by an ethical hacker at a Defcon conference:

"Alex Holden, the Wisconsin based researcher who showed me this crash, said the bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE. The crash does not appear to work in newer versions of IE.

"Holden said he notified Microsoft about his finding back in 2004. An e-mail thread Holden shared with krebsonsecurity.com indicates that Microsoft engineers believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, and that it would probably be fixed in a future service pack. Obviously, it never was."

Though as Krebs points out, that does leave the door open to some malware which changes the IE6 home page to that URL, which would mean it would always crash on launch, and you'd never be able to change it. A project for Microsoft?

Here's what it looks like. Enjoy..


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/mar/04/internet-explorer-6-countdown-microsoft

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