Another IE zero day exploited
Second DirectShow vulnerability in six weeks labelled 'extremely critical'.
Microsoft has issued an advisory on a serious vulnerability in an ActiveX control in its
Internet Explorer browser, the second zero-day alert in the same area of the product in recent months. The issue has
been flagged as 'extremely critical' by vulnerability watchers at Secunia, and several reports of active
exploitation in the wild have been seen, including some high-profile sites in China.
The flaw affects the DirectShow video streaming subsystem, hit by a similarly high-profile zero-day flaw in late May. This
time the MSVidCtl.dll library is affected, and maliciously crafted files passed into affected systems can be used to
remotely hijack vulnerable machines via silent drive-by download infections. The flaw is believed not to affect users of
Microsoft's latest operating system versions, Vista and Server 2008.
The official advisory from Microsoft is
here, with alerts and workarounds from
Secunia here and SANS ISC
here. More info is blogged by Trend Micro
here
and ScanSafe here,
with a McAfee blog piece providing details of a range of similar attacks and an attractive diagram of the attack
vector, here.
A similar diagram can be found in a post from the MMPC on the previous DirectShow issue,
here.
07 July 2009
Tags:
advisory, exploit, internet explorer, microsoft, vulnerability, workaround, zero day.
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