Microsoft Releases Security Vulnerability Alert – Better Late Than Never!

Last night, quite some time after acknowledging the bug that can cause the compromise of a system through the use of Internet Exploder 6 or Internet Exploder 7, the company sent out an alert concerning the exact vulnerabilities.

ComputerWorld gave the news, as well as giving the Microsoft workarounds for the specific triggering possibilities -

Microsoft Monday night issued a security advisory that provides customers with guidance and workarounds for dealing with a zero-day exploit aimed at Internet Explorer.

Earlier in the day, the company said it was investigating the incident which emerged over the weekend when someone published the exploit code to the Bugtraq mailing list. By Monday night, Microsoft switched gears and issued the advisory. There have not been any active exploits of the vulnerability reported so far.

Strange. A responder to my article of a couple of days ago stated that it had been observed by him, perhaps he did not report it. I know many who don’t, thinking that someone else must have reported already. This is not a good thing, as each report allows Microsoft to see how far the exploit has gotten; also, no two incidents are alike.

Microsoft released Security Advisory 977981, which includes workarounds for an issue that exposes a flaw in Cascading Style Sheets that could allow for remote code execution. Vulnerabilities that allow remote-code execution generally result in patches rated as critical by Microsoft.

The advisory confirmed the vulnerability affects IE 6 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and IE 6 and IE 7 on supported editions of XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft’s said users running IE 7 on Vista can configure the browser to run in Protected Mode to limit the impact of the vulnerability. It also recommended setting the Internet zone security setting to “High” to protect against the exploit. The “High” setting will disable JavaScript, which currently is the only confirmed attack mode.

Microsoft said IE 5.01 Service Pack 4 and IE 8 on all supported versions of Windows are not affected.

Is IE 5.01 SP4 a supported version of the browser? That’s news to me. Actually, the real fix is to dump the use of Internet Exploder – that avoids further troubles. For those who absolutely must use it, for access to Microsoft sites, banking sites, or whatever, Internet Exploder 8 seems immune thus far. My advice is still the use of another browser except when absolutely necessary.

For an attack to work, the hacker would first have to get his victim to visit a Web site that hosted the exploit code. This could be a malicious Web site set up by the hacker himself or it could be a site that allows users to upload content.

Another way cyber criminals have launched this type of attack, however, is by hacking into legitimate Web sites. Earlier this week, for example citizen’s band radio vendor Cobra Electronics disclosed that it had been hacked in June, most likely by a professional hacker who had used the site to download malware to customers.

Microsoft did not say whether it would patch the flaw during its next regularly scheduled set of security updates, due Dec. 8.

(Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.)

You know, no matter how incredibly difficult it seems to be to acquire these bugs, once they are announced, it seems as though some people go looking to become infected. It is a similar situation to the fire danger in California – some idiot announces that the conditions are perfect for forest fires on the television news and sure enough, we have a few fires. Prediction and proof.

Again, the best thing to do is stop using IE of any variety, unless absolutely necessary. Opera, Firefox, Chrome – take your pick, all are more secure.

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