SANS ISC: Every dot matters

• SANS Site Network
  • Current Site
  • SANS Internet Storm Center
  • Other SANS Sites Help
  • Graduate Degree Programs
  • Security Training
  • Security Certification
  • Security Awareness Training
  • Penetration Testing
  • Industrial Control Systems
  • Cyber Defense Foundations
  • DFIR
  • Software Security
  • Government OnSite Training

SANS ISC InfoSec Forums

Couple of days ago, one of our readers, Lee Dickey, reported a strange behavior of a link on Microsoft's Technet web page with information about SP2 for Vista. At first look, it appeared that a web page hosted by Microsoft was compromised as it redirected the browser to an external web site which was simply some kind of a search engine.

The screenshot of the page is shown below, can you spot the error?



That's right – a dot is missing between technet and microsoft.com, so the link actually pointed to technetmicrosoft.com, which is a domain registered by someone in the USA as easily checked with WHOIS.

So what happened here? Nothing malicious – it was simply an error by someone at Microsoft or a typo, however, what should be stressed out is the importance of link validation – if the owner of the technetmicrosoft.com domain was malicious, he could have done some serious damage. Luckily, Lee notified Microsoft as well and this was fixed quickly.

--
Bojan