Internet Explorer's dumbest bug ever revealed

BORED OF CREATING buffer overflow possibilities and security gaps an electronic elephant could walk through, Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team has turned its attention to good old HTML. Thankfully, this bug just crashes IE. Embarrassingly for the Vole, it's done with just one malformed line of HTML.

The bug is listed on BugTraq as requiring five lines of HTML but, after a small amount of experimentation, you'll find that it can be done with just one line of HTML. The offending line?

<input type crash>

In fact, the word "crash" doesn't really make any difference; you can put "calamari" or "IE sucks" in there and it will still go belly up.

So the Vole has definitely managed to outdo itself this time. According to Neowin, Outlook, Frontpage and anything else that uses shlwapi.dll suffers the same fate. So that simple line of malformed HTML could stop you from reading your email too.

You can find the Bugtraq post here. µ