Critical Internet Explorer Cumulative Patch Fixes Two Vulnerabilities
Severity: High
10 June, 2008
Summary:
- This vulnerability affects: Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions
- How an attacker exploits it: By enticing one of your users to visit a malicious Web page
- Impact: In the worst case, the attacker can execute code on your user’s computer, gaining complete control of it
- What to do: Deploy the appropriate Internet Explorer patches immediately
Critical Internet Explorer Cumulative Patch Fixes Two Vulnerabilities
Severity: High
10 June, 2008
Summary:
- This vulnerability affects: Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions
- How an attacker exploits it: By enticing one of your users to visit a malicious Web page
- Impact: In the worst case, the attacker can execute code on your user’s computer, gaining complete control of it
- What to do: Deploy the appropriate Internet Explorer patches immediately
Exposure:
In a security bulletin released today as part of its monthly patch update, Microsoft describes two vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer (IE) versions 5.01, 6.0, and 7.0. The worst of the two vulnerabilities involves IE’s inability to handle certain HTML objects properly, which causes a memory corruption. By luring one of your users into visiting a maliciously crafted Web page, an attacker can exploit this memory corruption vulnerability to execute code on that user’s computer, inheriting that user’s privileges. Typically, Windows users have local administrative privileges; in that case, the attacker could gain complete control of the victim’s computer.
Microsoft describes the second vulnerability as a “cross-domain information disclosure” vulnerability. Most web browsers impose a security measure called the same origin policy to help prevent one web site from accessing the contents of another web site. This security measure should protect you from an entire range of cross-site or cross-domain attacks, such as a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. Unfortunately, IE suffers from a flaw that allows attackers to bypass the same origin policy. Similar to a typical XSS attack, an attacker needs to entice one of your users into following a specially crafted link in order to exploit this cross-domain information disclosure vulnerability. However, rather than executing scripts under the context of a legitimate site, the attacker can only leverage this vulnerability to read data from a legitimate site. Even so, if your users visit secure web sites which store sensitive data, it is possible that an attacker could leverage this flaw to steal that data.
In addition to fixing these two newly announced flaws, today’s Internet Explorer patch also fixes all previously known flaws.
Solution Path:
These patches fix serious issues. You should download, test, and deploy the appropriate IE patches as soon as possible.
- Internet Explorer 5.01
- Internet Explorer 6.0
-
- Microsoft no longer supports 98, ME, or XP SP1
- For Windows 2000
- For Windows XP
- For Windows XP x64
- For Windows Server 2003
- For Windows Server 2003 Itanium
- For Windows Server 2003 x64
-
- Internet Explorer 7.0
For All WatchGuard Users:
These attacks travel as normal-looking HTTP traffic, which you must allow if your network users need to access the World Wide Web. Therefore, the patches above are your best solution.
Status:
Microsoft has released patches to fix these vulnerabilities.