http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24902.html

Swedish security researcher Andreas Sandblad has discovered that the MS Internet Explorer history list allows JavaScript in the URLs. The code will execute in the same zone as the last URL visited, which in the case of the error page generated by IE is the local computer zone. Thus when an error page is generated, JavaScript can be injected into the history and executed by use of the back button.

….etc; go read the article.

If nothing else, this proves to me that there are few if any really new security holes.

Back when I was messing around in university with “smart” serial terminals (VT52, CIT55 and greater) – we used to make games of using terminal escape-codes to program command-lines (eg: LOGOUT) onto programmable function-keys, and then use yet more escape-codes to load the code for that key into the keyboard’s input buffer.

On other words: squirt a bunch of escape sequences into someone’s terminal, and they would automatically log themselves out.

On the unix machines, it was even more fun to create filenames in your homedirectory, containing these sequences. Then anyone who cd‘ed into your homedir and did an ls would get logged out.