Internet Explorer

Microsoft said today it will issue an out-of-band patch tomorrow for a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that is being actively exploited. “The vulnerability exists due to an invalid pointer reference being used within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution,” Microsoft said in its Security Advisory 981374 earlier this month. ...

Last month, Microsoft sent flowers to a mock funeral for Internet Explorer 6, in a show of support for the ideal that the old browser should be declared defunct worldwide. But for a few years yet, the company is still bound to support the product for those users (generally businesses) who refuse to upgrade it. That’s why new exploits that continue to target old browsers, such as IE6 and IE7, continue to get attention even a full year after the proper security fix — IE8 — has been deployed. ...

In the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, security researchers and hackers quickly hacked three of the major browsers to take control of the underline operating systems. — A German hacker who goes by the handle “Nils” used a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla’s Firefox to gain control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. — Peter Vreugdenhil an independent researcher from the Netherlands, used several vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to take control of a machine running a patched 64-bit Windows 7 implementation. ...

Hi folks, One of our researchers recently discovered that the Liberty exploit kit included a fairly new exploit from November 2009 … http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2009-3867 . The fact that there was something fairly new in terms of exploits was interesting to start with, but then we looked at the text on the exploit page…. Lehman Brothers?! Coffee Party??!! Holy Activists, Batman!!! It’s politically motivated!!!! Then we looked at the stats page (all these toolkits come with a sophisticated admin page), and saw that the top referrer was ad.yieldmanager.com! Holy Advertisers, Batman! Activists who know how to use exploit kits, _and_ the ad network!!! ...

A little more than a week ago Microsoft started delivering a new Browser Choice for Windows to be compliant to the European Union law. There are plenty of web browsers to choose from, and my colleague Sorin Mustaca recommended Firefox. Usually a good choice, but currently users should be cautious about which browser they choose: Opera just released version 10.51 of their web browser. According to the changelog, it fixes a vulnerability which could lead to execution of injected code. Users of opera 10.50 should update as soon as possible. ...

Hot on the heels of the Patch Tuesday announcements yesterday, came the announcement of a new zero-day in Internet Explorer (CVE-2010-0806). Whilst checking through some URLs supposedly serving up malicious code to exploit this vulnerability, I noticed a link to some spam runs from earlier in the week. On March 8th SophosLabs saw spam messages attempting to trick the recipient into visiting rogue web pages. Messages used at least two social engineering tricks to lure victims into clicking the malicious link. ...

Exploit code for the the zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer has been added to the Metasploit framework. According to an email HD Moore wrote to ZDNet’s Ryan Naraine, the exploit works quite reliable – successful 50% of the times on Windows XP with SP2 and SP3 with IE7 and deactivated Data Execution Prevention (DEP). The security hole got reported yesterday on Microsoft’s March 2010 Patch Tuesday. Drive-by-Download-Exploits are likely to appear now as the Metasploit framework is open source and the exploit can now be abused even by script kiddies. Time to change the default browser – Microsoft just released a new browser choice screen which allows for exactly that! ...

Here’s a new vector: exploiting a Windows vulnerability through an Internet Explorer help menu Visual Basic script: “get ‘em to hit F1 and you own ‘em.” Microsoft is warning of a VBScript vulnerability in Internet Explorer (on Win2K, XP and Server03) that could be used to run malicious code. A malicious operator could create a web site that displays a specially crafted dialog box and prompts a victim to press the F1 key (help menu.) The exploit could then execute malicious code on a victim machine. (Windows versions that are not vulnerable are: Vista, Win7, Server08 R2 and Server08.) ...

Microsoft has announced in Advisory (980088) that there has been a publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 8. Users not running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode are at risk of having information, in files with predictable names, accessed by attackers. This vulnerability cannot be exploited to execute remote code or used for a denial-of-service attack. The largest group of users at risk are Windows XP users running IE without Protected Mode enabled. Internet Explorer on Vista and Windows 7 has Protected Mode enabled by default. ...