Through a sophisticated attack, a malicious applet can exploit this bug to delete a file or do other damage. This is a serious bug, which JavaSoft engineers are actively addressing, working in collaboration with Netscape and other Java licensees. A fix is currently undergoing testing and review. It will be made available to our source licensees as soon as possible. In normal use of the JDK to develop Java applets and applications this problem does not arise.
Developers can safely use the appletviewer as a way to view and test their own applets.
They are warned, however, not to use the appletviewer to view potentially hostile, unknown applets. We would like to thank the Internet community in general for helping us make the Internet more secure, and the Princeton team in particular for finding this implementation bug. Garcia Ave., Mtn. All rights reserved.