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New Internet Explorer Vulnerability Potentially Exposes All of the Victim's Files

Posted By Pete at 1:45 PM, January 26, 2010

A new vulnerability in Internet Explorer has been discovered (again). This time, instead of exploiting a flaw in the code, attackers can potentially use built-in IE features such as URL Security Zones and IE's file-sharing protocol to attack a victim's machine.
The result - gain access to all of the victim's files.

Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina, a security consultant will demonstrate proof-of-concept code next month after the Black Hat Conference in Washington DC, and Microsoft intends to subsequently release a patch for this soon after.
"These vulnerabilities are just features ... the implementation of the features allow you to obtain certain information, which by itself is harmless. But when combined together with other features, it renders an attack vector," Medina says.

To give you a better idea of how the attack is carried out, here is what Medina says about the attack. "With IE's Security Zones, an Internet zone would not be allowed to read files from a local machine, for instance. But if a local machine is considered part of the Internet zone, its files could be accessed by an attacker."

Until a patch is released, a few ways to protect yourself from being exposed would be to:
1. Deploy IE's Protocol Lockdown feature to restrict the file protocol
2. Set the security level to "High"
3. Disable active scripting in the Intranet and Internet Zones
4. Run IE in Protected Mode if available in the OS
5. Lock down and disable the MHTML protocol handler
6. And last but not least use another browser


Along with the attacks on Google last week, it seems to me that IE still has a long way to go before we can consider it "secure". This is not isolated to IE as Firefox actually has even more vulnerabilities. Software companies simply have to do a better job at breaking their products before releasing them to the public. As it stands, Web browsers and many other types of software are simply acting as a gateway for hackers to the rest of a user's system.

Posted by: Pete at 1:45 PM
Categories: General , Vulnerability

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