Netscape hit by hot-desking security hole

NEWS Netscape has confirmed that a bug in Navigator 4.5 can lead to security breaches when used in hot-desking environments. The bug was discovered by Peter Snow, a support engineer at Yale University, and could allow a user to access credit card details of another person who shares the same PC. The problem arises from the way Navigator negotiates an HTML caching meta tag. The tag tells the server not to cache the page, so although Navigator obeys by not caching the information to the hard disk, it still copies it to the memory cache. From there, the information can be readily retrieved according to Snow. Netscape UK was unable to comment on the issue, but US reports claim the problem will be corrected in the next version of product.