Phishing detection gets confused by malformed HTML

[John Wilcock]

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Given the following input (admittedly malformed, but this occurred in a
a genuine newsletter received by one of my users):

> <a href="
> <a
> href="http://www.redirector-example.com/?redirect">www.example.com</a>

MailScanner detects a phish, but apparently gets confused:

> <a href="
> <a
> href="http://www.redirector-example.com/?redirect"><font color="red"><b>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "<a
> href=" claiming to be</b></font> www.example.com</a>

Logging is confused too, split over two lines:

> Feb 17 08:53:27 gate MailScanner[4662]: Found phishing fraud from <a
> Feb 17 08:53:27 gate MailScanner[4662]: href= claiming to be www.example.com in 676A6E100C.5A3EA

Also, in trying to reproduce this I noticed that the same input but
without the quote on the malformed leading <a> tag is detected as being
IP-based phishing.

> <a href=
> <a
> href="http://www.redirector-example.com/?redirect">www.example.com</a>

Logged as:

> Feb 17 08:46:39 gate MailScanner[4662]: Found ip-based phishing fraud from <a in 3F5CEE100C.57EBC

The HTML is completely malformed and doesn't result in a working link,
but you might like to take a fresh look at the code in case there are
other ways to craft a malformed link that might actually work but get
through MS.


John.

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