Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hlandau | Hacker News Reader

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You can still do this as late as Win7. I think this was eliminated in Win8, but I've not used it myself.

If you do use Aero, you can change the window chrome colour to something custom, which should catch out sites trying to fake windows. I don't think browsers provide any way to get the window chrome colour, though come to think of it, I'm fairly sure IE does/used to provide system colour names in CSS, so it might not be impossible... (If you recall the Win2000-era colour customization window, which IIRC you can still access in current versions of Windows, it's just hidden, you can set things like default window background colour, which traditionally in the Win2000 era was grey. So I guess the idea is that websites could use these system colours if you changed them to be consistent with the OS. Of course nobody really does this.)

Windows 10 lets you pick a "custom accent color," and it allows you to make a few other custom tweaks as well (should the titlebar be white or colored?).

Since this is part of the initial setup wizard, I think it would be pretty hard to fake a Windows 10 dialog from inside a web browser.

That problem is easily solved. In your malware, simply use the default settings for all of those things, and you will catch the 97% of users who never customize any of it.

You can afford to lose the remaining 3%.

It's also a bit self selecting - there's a lower chance those that change the defaults will fall for these attacks anyway.

The title bar thing, yes.

The accent color? If you buy a new Windows 10 machine off the shelf, after you enter your name, it asks what your favorite color is. I think blue is highlighted when that screen comes up, but you can't miss the opportunity, so 3% is a bit low for an estimate of how many people will change it.

Favourite colors don't follow a random distribution. IIRC with blue and green you already have two thirds of the population.

A browser ad that imitates a windows dialog can only guess one color per impression. Forcing Mallory to settle for 1/3 of the otherwise-vulnerable population is a definite improvement.

CSS System Colors support[1] in Windows/IE makes this harder to stop than you many realize. I don't see it very much anymore, but when it first came out, I saw quite a bit of this.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#css2-system

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