Black hats target Windows Media Encoder bug
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Miscreants have wasted no time exploiting a critical hole in Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. Just four days after Redmond released fixes for that flaw and seven others, security experts found attack code in the wild that preys on users who have yet to install the patch.
Public attack code was published on the Milw0rm exploit list as early as Friday - just three days after Microsoft's Patch Tuesday - though it was dated Wednesday, September 10. By Saturday, honeypots maintained by researchers at Symantec began detecting variants.
"This attack chronology is another example of the rapid adoption of public exploits into widely deployed exploit toolkits," Symantec researcher Sean Hittel writes here.
Attackers are distributing the attacks in at least two different ways. One is through a simple clear-text program on Milw0rm where the sample shellcode has been modified. A second method comes courtesy of a widely deployed toolkit that goes by the name e2, according to Hittel.
e2 appends a first stage-encrypted block to legitimate web pages, causing visitors to be redirected to a second website that launches an attack. The e2 encryptor is similar to later versions of MPack in that it feeds an encrypted block through a two-key decoder.
Symantec doesn't say how widespread the attacks are or how successful they are at actually infecting end-users' PCs. Microsoft has warned that the bug can allow attackers to take complete control of a vulnerable machine, so the smartest course of action is to install right away. To make sure the patch has been applied to your PC go to Start > All Programs > Windows Update. ®
COMMENTS
So why isn't Sean Hittel (Symantec) doing something about it?
"This attack chronology is another example of the rapid adoption of public exploits into widely deployed exploit toolkits," Symantec researcher Sean Hittel writes here.
So... why isn't Symantec doing something about it, hmmmmm? Don't we pay these creeps to protect our PCs from malware that exploits this?
Oh wait... we expect AV to fail here, don't we? http://www.vmyths.com/column/1/2003/6/11/
adnim, stop blaming the messenger. Again. It's trivially easy to curb ActiveX controls and still have them work as designed. Try turning UAC back on in your Vista PC, and using a nonadmin account like you're supposed to.
Dan, this is old, old, old news by now. You're blaming Microsoft for a bug they fixed already. You hold MS to a double standard compared to Symantec, who fixes their broken software far more often than MS has to.
@adnim
"We need less bug ridden proprietary code in public user space, it should be a criminal offence to release code that can be exploited in such a way"
In that case 99% of software out there is illegal, regardless if it is proprietary or OS.
People just need to get over it. All software has bugs and the majority has some sort of security issues. In an ideal world they wouldn't, but in an ideal world, I wouldn't be stuck at work wanting to win the lottery
ActiveX again
One would have thought that ms would have realised that ActiveX is so broken that the technology will be obsolete before it is fixed. It is no good me or a respected security team saying don't use IE and don't use WMP, the message will not reach the parts the message needs to reach, namely the average IT illiterate user. I would hope readers of the Reg are sufficiently clued up as to not need this kind of advice. Mediaplayer classic and Firefox, less worry. If I cannot see/hear a media file with these products, then I don't see or hear it.
We need less bug ridden proprietary code in public user space, it should be a criminal offence to release code that can be exploited in such a way.
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