!?!?! HTA files are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS ?!?!

!?!?! HTA files are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS ?!?!

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!?!?! HTA files are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS ?!?! sorcerdon 01-05-2006
Posted by on January 5, 2006, 6:21 pm
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I read about HTA files.
And had to delete alot of these off my machine since last week I
recieved lots of virus attacks.

To create one of these files you simply have to rename your HTML files
to .HTA. The file tool bar will dissapear but most of the
HTML/JAVASCRIPT funtionality will remain.

These files are just like HTML files except the fact that they can
Access just about anything on your computer with READ/WRITE permissions
- and can even use javascript to implement all kinds of dangerous
behavior on your computer.

Just imagine - a simple hacker can use these files BEHIND THE scenes on
a FLASH website (since flash can run web pages in the background - or
use new window feature on some server). I mean you can even get user
name and passwords to secrure websites JUSt by reading the cookies of
one's machine and saving it to a XML file on your server...

This is even more generally easy if you are a developer on some
company. I mean, they have access to production server and can
implement these things to access people's personal information, storing
it, and then using it. This could include usernames and passwords. I
mean some websites store usernames/passwords on cookies so that the
next time the user comes to the wbsite, thye automatically logged in.

Has microsoft COMPLETELY lost their mind in enabling this application
ability?


Posted by Lionel Fourquaux on January 6, 2006, 10:51 am
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Calm down, you have missed one important point.

1136503284.463479.81000@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>And had to delete alot of these off my machine

I've a few of them on mine, too, and they are not viruses. I even wrote some
of them, since they are pretty handy for scripting.

> Just imagine - a simple hacker can use these files BEHIND THE scenes on
> a FLASH website (since flash can run web pages in the background - or
> use new window feature on some server). I mean you can even get user
> name and passwords to secrure websites JUSt by reading the cookies of
> one's machine and saving it to a XML file on your server...

No, they can't. HTA are executable files, handled much in the same way EXE
files are. You can think of them as a kind of program, with a graphical
interface designed as an HTML page. For the system, they *are* programs.
Your hypothetic hacker would face exactly the same blocks preventing the
execution of HTA files as for binary programs (and hopefully arbitrary
remote execution of binary programs is blocked).

> Has microsoft COMPLETELY lost their mind in enabling this application
> ability?

No, they don't, and they provided a very useful tool for writing scripts
with a user-friendly interface.

By the way, did you know that the control pannel user accounts management
tool uses HTML for its graphical interface? This is the same idea. HTML can
be useful for much more than web pages.


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