, SecurityFocus 2003-09-25
At least 1,000 automobile shoppers who submitted online credit applications to any of 150 different automotive dealerships around the U.S. had their personal and financial details exposed on a publicly-accessible website, according to a computer security consultant who stumbled across the privacy gaffe.
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Car shoppers' credit details exposed in bulk
2003-09-25
Anonymous (3 replies)
Anonymous (3 replies)
> Oh hold on, slow down. Right-click what?
Right-click the web page you are looking at. A "context sensitive menu" will pop up. One of the options is "View Page Source" or "View Source". Selecting that option shows you the HTML instructions for the page you are looking at. It takes less than a second to display the source; how long it takes to read it depends on how complex the page is, but could range from a couple of seconds to ten minutes.
This works in Netscape and Internet Explorer, and probably most other browsers too. It is not remotely anything like hacking, but a common practice among technically minded people (especially web designers) who just want to know "how did they get that effect?", "why isn't this working?" or "what will this do to my computer if I click on it?".
Since everyone was so keen about analogies about Lamo recently, try this one: this incident is like touching a poster display outside your bank to read the fine print, and suddenly realising that behind the poster lies an open, unguarded passage from the street straight in to the vault.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/7067/22641#22641