bug found in everything
since Windows 95
With help from IBM, Microsoft has patched a critical
Windows vulnerability that flew under the radar for
nearly two decades.
The bug has existed in every version of Windows
since Windows 95, and would have allowed an
attacker to run code remotely when the user visits
a malicious website. IBM researcher Robert
Freeman described the vulnerability as “rare,
‘unicorn-like’ bug found in code that IE relies on but
doesn’t necessarily belong to.”
According to Freeman, the bug relies on a
vulnerability in VBScript, which was introduced in
Internet Explorer 3.0. Even today, the bug is
impervious to Microsoft’s anti-exploitation tools
(known as Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit)
and the sandboxing features in Internet Explorer 11.
The good news is that there’s no evidence of
anyone actually exploiting this vulnerability in the
wild, and doing so would be technically tricky. IBM
first reported the issue in May, and is only making it
public now that a patch is available.
Of course, Microsoft’s latest patch only applies to
Windows Vista and higher, as support for Windows
XP ended in April. So if you’re running a 13-year-
old operating system, you’ll have to grapple with a
critical bug that’s even older.
Why this matters: As IBM points out, the discovery
shows how significant vulnerabilities can evade
detection for many years. But it also highlights a
type of vulnerability—one that involves arbitrary
data manipulation—that is fairly uncommon. IBM
warns that there could be other, similar bugs that
haven’t been discovered yet, with multiple
exploitation techniques for attackers to install
keyloggers, screen grabbers and remote access
tools. Users are just lucky this one was caught—
eventually.
Hakuna maoni:
Chapisha Maoni