Re: The Dangers of Allowing Users to Post Images

[Michal Szokolo <msz () kill-spammers pmp com pl>]

John Percival wrote:
> I'm going to try and throw another issue into this discussion now too:
> denial of service. We have discussed it for attacking remote servers, but
> not for the client viewing the image. It's something else that I spotted
> while I was playing around with this issue just now.
>
> If you have images that include a mailto:me () my host somewhere com source,
> then the default handler for mailto: links is opened up. Be that Outlook,
> Netscape Composer, Eudora, or whatever else you care to use.
>
> So if someone embedded 100 (arbitrary figure) mailto: images in a page, then
> this would do a lot of harm to the user's computer. At best, it would get
> very busy for a few minutes creating new emails, and would be a pain to
> clear up. At worst, it could bring the whole system crashing down.

Netscape 4.77 crashes at about 50 such IMG tags, IF they are different
(simply putting mailto:fakeluser@fakedomain 100 times won't work (opens
only 2 message windows)), but if you go with some script... instant
crash (try it now free of charge at http://msz.pmp.com.pl/boom/ ;-)).

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