Reviewers Recommend My DP 9 - review by Captain Jack Director: Laurent Sky, Julia Grandi Starring: Cherry Kiss, Kazumi, Jayla De Angelis, Viola Weber. Read review
"Hackers stepped up attacks Friday on computers running some versions of Windows, a day after Microsoft disclosed a hole related to the mouse cursor. ..."
" ...is aimed at PCs running Windows Vista, the new operating system that the company has touted as its most secure. The hole has also been found on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows XP Service Pack 2 and some versions of Windows Server 2003. ... "
"...So far, .... attacks have been limited to Web surfing with Internet Explorer versions 6 or 7. Firefox, the open-source browser from Mozilla, does not yet seem vulnerable. "
This is actually a pretty nasty one, it uses USER32 (a low level process in Windows) as a proxy it can carry out all types of things including harvesting, acting as a trojan, passcode recording, zombie etc., and because most people log in as administrators, AV and Firewalls won't detect or block it.
There is a temporary fix available from EEYE Research, who found the hole as well as another in late 04 dealing with metafiles.
This patch causes my Sony Vaio to randomly crash. At boot time I get an error about user32.dll being relocated to a different area of memory due to a conflict with the MS HTML ocx control.
You might try EEYE's tempory fix then. They also have the source available if you know C++. From what I see their quick and dirty is to intercept all calls for cursors and prevent any of them from loading outside of %root%.
If your machine is creating crash reports do send them in, it may take them awhile but they do fix them.
This isn't a IE problem but a problem within Windows itself. And don't believe that FF/Mozilla makes you immune, the exploit has been discovered to work with that as well, in fact any program local or external that loads non-system ANI files via the WINAPI in USER32 could abuse this exploit.
True. but every now and then, you'll run across a site that FF seems to have issues with (or that seems to have issues with FF). Only reason why I ever use IE at all.
Yeah , it's usually because of bad coding, I don't really run into them. I have noscript, adblock and other addons going. IE feels clunky, I cant even force myself to use it
My DP 9 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Mar 31 2007 : 10:58AM