Security researcher Abdulrahman Alqabandi reported that when a local HTML file resides in the same directory as a malicious local shortcut file, the shortcut can be called by the local page to allow the page to read the contents of local files or directories or to load an arbitrary website in violation of same-origin policy, allowing for data theft. In order for this vulnerability to be triggered, both the malicious HTML file as well as the shortcut must be saved to the same local directory and then loaded from there by a user. 


External Reference:

https://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2016/mfsa2016-80.html


Acknowledgements:

Name: the Mozilla project
Upstream: Abdulrahman Alqabandi