IE "phishing" fix lockout causes more complaints

Some web developers are complaining that an Internet Explorer patch that's meant to foil net scams is disabling some applications that didn't put a premium on security.

Microsoft last week announced that a modification to its IE browser would stop the insecure practice of including sensitive information in links. The update, which was released Monday, had some website programmers up in arms yesterday due to complaints from web users that they could no longer log in to sites that secure entry through credentials included in the URL.

"Microsoft may have legitimate reasons for addressing the issue, but the way they addressed it - an across-the-board kill of an industry standard - is troublesome," said James Rosko, a software engineer for a data-processing service on the web. He and other programmers spent Tuesday night making changes to the programs that process login requests for his company's website, which he requested not be named.

The incident could be the first known case of Microsoft getting attention for putting security before a feature used by some of its customers. Microsoft promised to put security first when it launched its Trustworthy Computing Initiative more than two years ago. But some critics have claimed that they haven't seen many results.

"I really look at it from the standpoint of the majority of customers," said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager at Microsoft's security response centre. "Our customers have said, 'We want security,' and so that is the change that we gave them."

The problem occurs when programmers design a website to enable a web user to log in by typing credentials into the URL. In such cases, the web address might look like this: http://username:password@www.somecompany.com/program.ext. The link gives the person access to a company's website when the authentication program verifies the username and password.

Because the username and password are part of the web address and are not encrypted, embedding the credential in the URL is considered a security risk, said William Kennedy, CTO at ActivMedia Robotics and the co-author of HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide.

"It was a dumb idea to include such functionality in the first place," Kennedy said. "There are millions of other ways of logging in to a site."

However, that sentiment was not what made Microsoft disable the feature. The software giant made the change to stop scam artists from constructing URLs that appeared to link to a legitimate website but actually directed people to a fraudulent site. For instance, a URL that appears to go to eBay could actually send the person to a fraudulent site such as: http://www.ebay.com@fraudsite.com.

The fake site will typically ask for a person's username and password and then use that information to complete a scam. Major banks and other financial websites, such as PayPal, are popular targets of such fraud, often called "phishing." The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the government organisation that underwrites US citizens' banks accounts, recently warned of a similar scam.

"I suspect most folks never heard of this feature," said Richard Smith, a privacy and security expert. "The big exception, of course, is the phishing scam artists."

Programmer Rosko acknowledges that putting the username and password in the URL is not very secure, but he stressed that some applications don't need the security.

"This is for noncritical information," he said. "It is information that we would just rather not have everyone on the web have access to."

Robert Lemos writes for CNET News.com and CNET News.com's Paul Festa contributed to this report