RealPlayer zero-day flaw exploited
Manufacturer responds rapidly to serious security hole.
A zero-day vulnerability in the popular media playing system RealPlayer was spotted being exploited in the wild
late last week, with several trojans penetrating vulnerable systems from malicious websites in silent drive-by downloads.
The flaw is in a piece of code previously exploited to cause denial of service, but thought to be safe from remote code
exploitation until this discovery. Responding speedily to warnings posted on the Symantec blog and elsewhere,
manufacturer RealNetworks managed to turn around an update to fix the problem the same day.
The exploit uses ActiveX and thus only affects Windows users running Internet Explorer. The patch,
available from Real here, works
for version 10.5 and the beta of version 11 recently made available, and any users still running earlier versions are
advised by Real to upgrade to the latest edition and apply the patch to ensure they are safe from exploitation.
Details of the attack are on the Symantec blog
here
or at McAfee
here.
Those Windows users who choose to shun popular exploitation target Internet Explorer in favour of other
browsers should beware of feeling too smug however. Both Opera and Firefox require patching after a
series of fixes for important security issues were released last week. Overviews of the problems, and the updates to
fix them, are at Secunia here (for Firefox) and
here (for Opera).
22 October 2007
Tags:
exploit, firefox, internet explorer, opera, patch, realplayer, vulnerability, zero-day.
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