Dotless IP addres?!? What the heck am I talking about you may ask.

Well, IP addresses generally look like this:

208.187.212.217 (which is www.whitehouse.gov

Name: www.w3.org 18.29.1.34 =================== Name: dunkindonuts.com Address: 63.150.150.20 =================== Name: content.puregeek.net Address: 206.101.74.66 First: Do nslookup on www.puregeek.net

Server:phoenix.puregeek.net
Address:206.101.72.10

Name:content.puregeek.net
Address:206.101.74.66
Aliases:www.puregeek.net

Among the interesting information yeilded, you will see that the IP address for www.puregeek.net is 206.101.74.66 Take the components of that IP address, like so:

206
101
74
66

and convert them to hexadecimal, like so: (I used the calculator program that comes with Windows in Scientific Mode)

CE
65
4A
42

Lay out these hexadecimal quads in their original order:

CE.65.4A.42

Take out the dots:

CE654A42

and convert this number back to decimal:

3462744642
Insert this number into the address bar of Netscape, or Opera, or Lynx and you will arrive at the website in step one.

Unfortunately, this no longer works in Internet Explorer. For the reason why, I will quote from http://www.insiderreports.com (the exact URL of the article I am quoting is http://www.insiderreports.com/department.ASP_Q_ChanID_E_WB_A_DeptID_E_GTKN_A_StoryID_E_20000104)

"From the Microsoft website: Microsoft has released a patch that fixes a vulnerability with how Internet Explorer 4 determines what security zone a target server is in. By using this vulnerability, a malicious hacker could misrepresent the URL of their website, causing the site to be treated as it if were located on an intranet by Internet Explorer's Security Zones feature. This cannot happen accidentally, rather a malicious website operator must intentionally misrepresent the URL of their site by creating malicious code for users to be affected by this issue.

Microsoft highly recommends that users that have affected software installed on their systems should download and install the available patch as soon as possible.

The Dotless IP Address issue involves a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that could allow a malicious hacker to circumvent certain Internet Explorer security safeguards. This vulnerability makes it possible for a malicious web site operator to misrepresent the URL of an Internet web site and make it appear as if the machine is on the user's Local Intranet Zone. Internet Explorer has the ability to set security settings differently between different zones. By this means, a malicious site could potentially perform actions that had been disabled in the Internet Zone or Restricted Sites Zone, but is permitted in the Local Intranet Zone.

The nature of this vulnerability is that in determining what zone a web site belongs to, Internet Explorer interprets a 32-bit number (i.e. http://3513026787) as an all numeric host name, while the IP stack resolves this address to its equivalent dotted IP format (i.e. 209.100.136.227). Internet Explorer incorrectly considers this machine to be on the Local Intranet Zone, rather than in the Internet Zone, and could incorrectly apply security settings to the webserver.

Note: The default configuration for both the Internet Zone and the Local Intranet Zone is Medium Security. However, there is one difference between these defaults: the Local Intranet Zone enables the automatic use of NTLM challenge response authentication with local intranet machines, while this option is disabled by default when talking with servers in the Internet Zone."

What this means in layman's terms, is that Microsoft wrote a bunch of lazy code into their security protocols, and when they got bit in the ass by it, rather than fix the problem, they wrote a patch to disable dotless IP support.

Yet another nifty geek thing bastardized, broken and contorted out of recognition by the boys and girls at Microsoft. Good work kids! (fuckers)

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