Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

A Medireview Approach To Stopping E-Mail Attacks

Posted by timothy on from the can-neither-confirm-nor-deny dept.

dcsmith writes: "This article at the Need To Know web site reports that the free(as in beer) e-mail arm of Yahoo has been replacing certain words in messages received by yahoo.com e-mail accounts. In an apparent attempt to forestall cross-site scripting attacks, 'mocha' becomes 'espresso' and 'free expression' becomes 'free statement'... My personal favorite - since medieval contains the text "eval", it is altered to 'medireview' ... Check Google for the number of web sites containing medireview." Kwelstr points to this story at New Scientist as well.

3 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Enh? by gregbaker · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Forgive me if I'm being dense, but how does replacing the word "mocha" prevent cross-site scripting problems? Is mocha() a function in some language with semantics "format the hard drive"?

    Even if there's some great effect, wouldn't it be easy to replace the word only if it appeared in a script? Or does IE extend it's baffling type guessing to parts of documents as well?

  2. Reason for changes... by joebp · · Score: 5, Interesting
    eval => review

    Eval is a commonly used javascript command (duh).

    mocha => espresso

    An interesting one. Mocha is the old name for what became Javascript.

    expression => statement

    Obvious

    javascript => java-script

    Breaks most javascript embedded in HTML email.

    jscript => j-script

    As above.

    vbscript => vb-script

    Breaks most vbscript embedded in HTML email.

    livescript => live-script

    Another old name for Javascript.

    However, this seems the most retarded possible way of cutting out scripts in HTML emails.

    Better, would be a regexp something like .*? and targetted removal of a few other tags.

  3. Other amusing mangled words floating around by nd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The use of these words have also been catching on due to this behavior:

    "retrireview" (retrieval): 333 matches at google.
    "prreviewent" (prevalent): 41 matches at google.

    I'm still confused as to how this has affected so many web sites out there. Are people simply seeing these words in e-mail and then use them on their own thinking it's proper? Or are many webmasters cut and pasting their content from HTML e-mails or something?