Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/09/microsoft_security_delayed/
Microsoft knew of nasty IE bug a year before attacks
Security delayed or security denied?
Posted in Security, 9th July 2009 07:02 GMT
Microsoft was aware of a critical vulnerability in an Internet Explorer component at least 12 months before attackers started targeting it in lethal exploits that take full control of end-users' PCs, a member of its security team said Wednesday.
The disclosure comes as attacks targeting the MSVidCtl ActiveX control vulnerability have increased exponentially. On Monday, online ads distributed by through the Giant Realm network on popular gaming websites began including code that exploits the bug, according to security firm ScanSafe. The ads mean that anyone using IE to browse sites such as diii.net and incgamers.com are risk if they run the XP or 2003 versions of Windows and have not yet installed a quick fix.
(A spokeswoman for Giant Realm said she was looking into ScanSafe's report. She didn't get back to us by time of publication).
As reported earlier by IDG News and Dark Reading, Microsoft was alerted to the flaw in 2008. This occurred around April or May, The Register has finally determined.
The company didn't issue an advisory and temporary fix until Monday, a day after reports first surfaced that the vulnerability was being exploited in the wild. (To be fair, it took Apple until last month to fix a critical vulnerability in Mac versions of the Java virtual machine, six months after Windows versions were patched).
Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said there are some very good reasons why the company waited so long, and one of the security researchers who discovered the bug concurs. More on that in a moment. But for others in the security industry, the delay is troubling because it may have given attackers a leg up.
"Whenever there is a zero day, the big concern is that other attackers will adopt it for their own purposes, and that's exactly what's happened here," Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, told The Register. "And they were pretty quick to do it, because this was a day after the zero-day exploit became widely known."
Rogue ads on gaming sites are by no means the only place where the vulnerability is being exploited. Google searches such as this one suggest there may be close to 3 million compromised webpages that redirect users to a malicious site targeting the exploit. That's a massive increase from just a few days ago, when the number of compromised websites was believed to be in the thousands.
Microsoft's Reavey defended the decision to withhold an advisory until Monday, explaining that any fix must meet a demanding balancing act that ensures it is thorough enough to block a wide variety of related attacks while narrow enough that it doesn't cripple crucial parts of the software.
"Not every issue is the same as far as the level of work we need to do to be comprehensive in making sure we fix not just the issue reported to us but any similar issues," he said. "If we release an update that breaks apps it doesn't protect anybody because they won't install it."
'Not so much a coincidence'
The fix Microsoft issued Monday kills 49 45 CLSIDs related to the vulnerable ActiveX control (for a video feature known as DirectShow), 48 44 more than are currently being targeted, Reavey said. At the same time, Microsoft engineers "had to make sure that we didn't unintentionally kill something that did have a known use."
Reavey went on to say the timing of the advisory "is not so much a coincidence as we we have been working on it since 2008 and these attacks cover some of that work and so we were able to move fast and address what we know bad buys are using right now."
His comments lay out the awesome responsibility that comes when you're the maker of an overwhelmingly dominant operating system and you find critical vulnerabilities in it. Issue a fix too soon and you make matters worse. Spend a year investigating, as Microsoft did in this case, and attackers may flood the world with exploits before you get a chance to issue a patch through normal channels.
That's too bad because many of the pages preying on the exploit reside on well-trafficked websites, mostly operated by legitimate organizations based in China. Some researchers are comparing the DirectShow vulnerability to the one that touched off the Conficker worm, believed to have compromised millions of Windows PCs. Both have the ability to infect a large base of users quickly, they warn.
A year to investigate a bug that later turns out to be easily exploitable seems like a long time to us. These attacks have been under way since early June, according to security experts. Had the company been able to push out a fix during its regular patch cycle, it would have prevented the exploitation of untold numbers of Windows users who did nothing more than browse to the wrong website.
But that's not how Ryan Smith, one of the researchers who discovered the bug, sees things.
"The actual mechanics of the vulnerability aren't standard and that's kind of what took Microsoft so long," he said in an interview. "They were definitely working diligently to fix the problem. It was more the nature of the flaw that took so much time."
Smith, who now works for security firm iDefense, says he's not at liberty to discuss the specifics of the bug, although he says there will be additional details offered during a talk he and two other researchers plan to give later this month at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
What he can say is that he received regular updates from Microsoft throughout that time.
"They're one of the best vendors to work with," he said. "A lot of vendors won't give you any information. Microsoft was very forthcoming with the details."
What shouldn't get lost in this controversy is the simple fact that now, no one has to be bitten by this ugly bug. If you use any flavor of Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, you should immediately hit this link and click on the Fix it icon to enable a workaround. It's quick, painless and crucial, given all the time that's already been lost. ®