Microsoft disable username / password coding in links :(
 

"The newly announced patch will disable a feature that lets people code a username and password directly into a link so that someone clicking the link can easily access the restricted page to which it points."

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/sec...9145074,00.htm

We were using this feature all over our sites.
Anyone else afected?

I used it just on my local home page, to log into sponsor sites and such. I figured "no big deal, I'll just use Stats Remote to log in to the sponsor sites," but unfortunately Stats Remote used the same technique. :)

Not a bad idea...

thats fucking stupid, why would they do that?

yeah
i noticed statsremote use the same
what will they do?
is this a problem at all?

my guess would be security issues.

We are trying to find a solution for this ASAP.

The reason was that scammers would send people a URL like:

http://www.visa.com:[email protected]/

and fucking nimrods would see "www.visa.com" and enter
their credit card info. I can see why MS wants to cater to
nimrods, but I wish they'd allowed non-nimrods to enable
user:pw@ as an option.

They do...

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q834489
---
How to disable the new default behavior for handling user information in HTTP or HTTPS URLs

To disable the new default behavior in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer, create iexplore.exe and explorer.exe DWORD values in one of the following registry keys and set their value data to 0:

For all users:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_HTTP_USERNAME _PASSWORD_DISABLE

For the current user only:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_HTTP_USERNAME _PASSWORD_DISABLE
---

Holy crap, silly me just checked the "Internet Options" settings in IE. :-) Thanks. Gotta hand it to MS, no clueless newbs are going to switch on the user/pass thing by accident this way!

The funny thing is that I use MicrosoftOffice.com/LiveMeeting to give demos of Dollars.com remotely. The user clicks a link with the username and password coded to enter the software app.

Go Microsoft!

lol :)

Not good news...

The security risk is that a user uses that feature and then visits another site from your members section. As referrer you will see the URl including the username and password. I used to surf a lot of porn for free that way ;)

I see a lot of username/passwords in my referrer logs too. People really shouldn't use that feature.

The update deleted all of my stored passwords, as well. I've spent half the day searching through old emails and printouts.

garce