20 December 2003
Updated: 17:39 GMT
The third-party 'open source' patch for Internet Explorer that we told you about earlier today, contains more than a few potentially nasty surprises. As we noted, German tech site Heise had already warned of dangerous buffer overflows.
Openwares.org, a month-old site which boasts "Software is free" today published source code and a binary executable purporting to fix a loophole in Internet Explorer for Windows. It's unusual, but not unprecedented, for third parties to issue their own fixes for Microsoft's exploit-riddled browser. But Heise advises that this patch could be more trouble than it's worth, and the fix has already been taken in for some maintenance.
"This patch addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer that could allow Hackers and con-artists to to display a fake URL in the address and status bars. The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error, which can be exploited by including the "%01" and "%00" URL encoded representations after the username and right before the "@" character in an URL," according to a release note accompanying the patch
Unfortunately, the authors of the patch also enabled a Windows Registry key used by spyware. IEmsg.dll.
"Wow, this was a truly poor attempt at a fix. Buffer overflows, memory leaks, and a nice liveupdate.exe hidden in the registry. I thought proprietary Microsoft software was bad!" writes one poster.
More Story -
http://www.theregister.com/content/55/34618.html
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