In a twist of irony, Microsoft Internet Explorer, the browser everyone loves to deride for being insecure, is immune to a recently-discovered security flaw. The problem presents itself when handling foreign language characters that closely resemble letters of the English alphabet. Cnet has this to say:

The problem arises because certain browsers support a standardized way of representing domain names in the letters or characters of any language, security expert Eric Johanson said at the ShmooCon hacker convention this weekend. Called Internationalized Domain Names, the standard allows companies to register domain names that appear to be the same in different languages.

In other words, it’s possible for criminals to spoof paypal.com, for example, by replacing the P’s with letters from a foreign alphabet that resemble English letters. Safari, as well as Opera and Mozilla-based browsers are affected. No official fixes have yet been released.