11:21 AM

If you need yet another reason to switch to Mozilla, try this on — No relief from Microsoft phishing bug:

Tuesday’s edition of Microsoft’s monthly bundle of security advisories features an omission that should keep online fraud artists and identity thieves happy: over one month after its discovery, there is no official patch available for a bug in Internet Explorer that lets swindlers pass off counterfeit websites as the real thing.

The bug, publicly detailed on December 9th by “Zap the Dingbat,” is an easily exploited flaw in the way Internet Explorer displays URLs in the address bar: it turns out the browser is incapable of displaying the special character “%01,” or anything following it, in a Web address.

That simple gaffe is tailor-made for the devious online swindle called “phishing,” in which a fraudster spams the Internet with e-mail purporting to be from a reputable financial institution or e-commerce site, and urging the recipient to click on an included link to update their personal profile or carry out some transaction. The link takes the victim to a fake website designed — with increasing sophistication — to look like the real deal, but where any personal or financial information entered is routed directly to the scammer.

Experts have traditionally advised consumers to avoid these scams by carefully checking the address bar in their browser window to verify that they’re actually on citibank.com, for example, before entering their password or account information. But the IE bug makes that advice obsolete: combined with URL obfuscation techniques already well known to phishers, IE helpfully transforms a clumsy fake like “www.citibank.com%01@211.239.150.170/login/login.htm” into the flawless counterfeit “www.citibank.com.”