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Comment by cryptbe | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Give me a break, please. What the OP reported was a super minor issue, and he's already got what he deserves.

His bug allowed him to inject links into verification emails sent by Google Scholar. He claimed that he could inject CSS links too, but that didn't make this problem any worse. Why? Because it's up to mail clients to load the linked CSS stylesheets or not. Gmail, for example, would never load those remote CSS files. If your webmail client does that, it's time to switch to a better one.

So he could inject links, which is annoying, but still a very minor issue. It may make phishing a bit easier, but you know what phishing has always worked against average Joe if you try hard enough. That means that this problem doesn't really give an attacker any advantages that he couldn't do by himself.

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the team that handles VRP.

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> If your webmail client does that, it's time to switch to a better one.

Academic users constitute an audience that's quite often bound to use a single, potentially-outdated webmail system. In our experience, academic/University users are utilizing what we consider "nonstandard" email systems with an order of magnitude more regularity than nonacademic users. You may wish to better understand the audience of the product before asserting that they should "switch".

And claiming something is not a security issue because you're trusting a client you don't control to behave well is naive at best, and apologist at worst. It's genuinely upsetting to hear coming from someone who classifies vulnerabilities.

I didn't say that I trust mail clients. I said mail clients shouldn't accept arbitrary HTML markups and tags in emails. That's a serious problem that needed to be addressed, regardless of Google Scholar being exploited to send emails with arbitrary links or not.

The onus is still on Google - the rule of the web is that any clients that one allows connections from are fair games that one has to address.

If you were using an email client that executes arbitrary HTML, you'd be owned since a long time anyway. That'd like using a browser that doesn't have any cross domain security boundary - it's just not a realistic attack vector, these things don't exist - or do you know an email client that actually interprets JS?

You don't need to execute JS in order to phish, as the original link alludes to with the html comment trick.

This particular comment thread was mostly about webmail clients. But to your specific question... take a look at the link for an incomplete list of email clients that runs JS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients#Tem...

What? He could have just as easily used inline styles.

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