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Another Internet Explorer exploit has been discovered.

Here's the kicker: I warned you about this already (sorta). On Day 16 of the 30 days to becoming an Opera7 Lover series, I talked about this functionality.

The trick is simple, you create a website that looks like this: www.microsoft.com@example.com which makes the casual observer think that it is actually Microsoft. If you are very clever you can hide the URL through a variety of methods.

That's the bad news. The good news is that none of these methods fool Opera. And if you do happen to click on such a link, Opera will warn you with a panel like this:

This exploit takes advantage of two things: 1) Internet Explorer gives you no such warning (neither does Mozilla/Phoenix) and 2) a bug in Internet Explorer which encodes a hex character in the URL which prevents the rest of the URL from being shown in the addressbar.

As I have said before, if you use Internet Explorer, you are playing Russian roulette with your computer security. While Mozilla/Phoenix will show you the entire URL, it will give you no warning about the construction of the URL which may be deceptive.