How to Make Internet Explorer 6 Crash Instantly

News
By Marcus Yam
published

It's definitely no Konami code.

Most of you are likely to be running one of the most recent versions of your browser of choice, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari; so hopefully this little bug won't take your browser down.

It's been discovered and now popularly reported that Internet Explorer 6 can be crashed by simply pointing the browser to:

ms-its:%F0:

Those without IE6 still lingering in their systems can get a demonstration of what happens in the video below.

KrebsonSecurity explains that this bug is the result of a pointer overflow in IE6 and the crash does not appear to work in newer versions of the browser.

Interestingly, it seems that this bug was found and reported to Microsoft back in 2004, but has yet to be patched. At the time, Microsoft engineers supposed believed there were no severe security consequences of this bug, leaving it a fix for a service pack – but that fix never arrived.

While the true damage of this flaw isn't severe, it could still cause many annoyances if malware (or a prankster) were to change the default start page to "ms-its:%F0:", rendering the browser unusable without a more advanced IE option tweak.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
38 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Hothr
    Maybe if people post that in enough links and web-pages we can euthanize IE6 and not have to wait for it's slow death.
    Reply
  • itadakimasu
    so everybody can put links to this on their sites.
    Reply
  • Computer_Lots
    Die IE6, DIE!!!
    My company FINALLY "upgraded" to IE7 a couple of months ago, after IE8 came out. I don't get it. IE8 is faster, more stable and more secure than IE7. Why would we upgrade to that??? Another one of the joys of working for a large company.
    Reply
  • NapoleonDK
    In related news: IE6 is lame.

    Move along folks, nothing to see here.

    (On another note, does anyone actually hit the "Send error report" button?
    Reply
  • amasen
    He's spreading the word...
    Make sure to put in redirects for IE6 only...
    Let the death of IE 6 be a universal effort.
    Reply
  • ljbade
    I think those websites that use Javascript to detect IE6 and display a message because they no longer support it, should instead change it to crash IE6. Much stronger message if you don't care about cutting off your IE6 audience.
    Reply
  • Tomtompiper
    On another note, does anyone actually hit the "Send error report" button?

    Are you trying to give us all RSI?


    All joking aside I don't, on my current system I don't get very many crashes. And when I do it displays a log which I copy and paste then e-mail in.
    Reply
  • mayne92
    stoppostingcrapnewsWhy did you this crap article?This is so damn old and there's really no point posting this article.Everybody knows IE6 is crap so why bother?QQ loser
    Reply
  • deadlockedworld
    This sounds like a perfect homepage to set on a co-workers computer!
    Reply
  • CrashOverride90
    IE6 is old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, old, and old.

    Oh and did I mention its Old? I forget easily

    Seriously people need to dumb the old IE6
    Reply