An open source and freeware development outfit, Openwares.org, has released a patch for an IE spoofing vulnerability. Unfortunately, it came with its own added buffer overflow vulnerability, together with a mechanism which appears to pass information over to the Openwares' web site.

Microsoft itself has however only warned of the vulnerability, and has not issued its own patch yet, so the Openwares version has attracted some interest.

If Microsoft needed a case study to illustrate the importance of trustworthy computing and not rushing fixes out before you're absolutely sure of them, however, this is shaping up to be it.

The vulnerability added by the patch is described at heise.de (article in German), and earlier today Openwares said it was working on a patch for the patch it. But it's starting to look like a fuller explanation will be necessary. ®