Growing Bad Practice with Login Forms

["Mark Curphey" <mark () curphey com>]

I am seeing more and more sites implementing a bad practice with login
forms.

To pick on a high profile site that should know better take ISACA as an
example.

http://www.isaca.org/

In the top left hand corner you will see their secure login button and a
graphical padlock embedded into the HTML. Of course if you look at the form
tags, this does indeed submit the form over SSL and in the process the SSL
handshake checks the certificate and my browser should verify that I am
indeed sending my password to isaca.org. 

But at that point its too late. The check for server authentication is done
after I have sent by username and password. This IMHO is a bad practice that
has started to creep into other sites including online banking. 

I have added the issue to the OWASP Pen Test CheckList.