http-equiv has discovered a weakness in Internet Explorer, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to trick users into visiting a malicious website.

It is normally possible for script code to manipulate information displayed in the status bar. However, an error in Internet Explorer allows manipulation of the status bar without using any script code. This can be exploited by embedding a specially crafted form in a link.

Example:
<A HREF="http://[trusted_site]/">
<FORM action=http://[malicious_site]/ method=get>
<INPUT style="BORDER-RIGHT: 0pt; BORDER-TOP: 0pt; FONT-SIZE: 10pt;
BORDER-LEFT: 0pt; CURSOR: hand; COLOR: blue; BORDER-BOTTOM: 0pt;
BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; TEXT-DECORATION: underline"
type=submit value=http://[trusted_site]/>
</A>

This also affects Outlook Express as it uses the same HTML rendering functionality as Internet Explorer. Outlook Express users may especially trust information displayed in the status bar since HTML documents are viewed in context of the "Restricted" zone, which has scripting support disabled.

Successful exploitation may result in a user being tricked into visiting a malicious website by following a specially crafted link.

The problem has been confirmed in versions 5.01 and 6. Version 5.5 is likely also affected.

Solution
Never follow links from untrusted sources.

Provided and/or discovered by
http-equiv, malware.com.

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
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