Risk: High
The security firm Secunia has reported a vulnerability in Opera, which can be exploited by people to compromise a user's system.
The vulnerability is caused due to the shell script used to launch Opera parsing shell commands that are enclosed within backticks in the URL provided via the command line. This can e.g. be exploited to execute arbitrary shell commands by tricking a user into following a malicious link in an external application which uses Opera as the default browser (e.g. the mail client Evolution on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4).
This vulnerability can only be exploited on Unix / Linux based environments.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 8.5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Other versions and platforms may also be affected.