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Zero Day Exploits Emerge For Microsoft
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-04-11
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The pattern of releasing exploits right around the time Microsoft patches its products on a monthly basis has emerged again with the sighting of more attacks against newly found flaws.
 | | Zero Day Exploits Emerge For Microsoft |  |
The idea is to catch computers outside of Microsoft's patching window. Every time this works for the criminals, they gain another machine that can deliver personal information to them via keylogging, serve as a spam gateway, or redirect web requests to fake websites.
Those threats to a zero-day exploit usually persist for the month between updates, as Microsoft only rarely releases a fix out of band. Or as we saw in March, they could make the astonishing decision not to release any patches, though that has only happened twice in a couple of years.
After several months in a row of this, it's hard to go along with the opinion that such releases are just coincidence. The McAfee Avert Labs blog has already picked up on a number of exploits targeting Microsoft Office.
So far their research has discounted all but one as denial of service threats. The remaining issue found by McAfee researchers could possibly pose a buffer overflow problem, which would lead to the dreaded remote code execution situation if exploited.
Later yesterday they found another potential problem, this time in the HLP files handled by Windows. Again, this one is a heap overflow with potential remote code execution at the end of it.
German and Russian Text Slip Into Spam: Researchers at Symantec said in their April 'State of Spam' report that spammers sending messages in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) have been dropping Russian and German text into their junk mailings.
The purpose of that is to obfuscate the message enough that it will fool spam filters. "This is a twist on an old obfuscation technique that we refer to as a "Shakespeare attack," in which spammers will insert random excerpts from a book somewhere in the body of the spam message," researcher Kelly Conley wrote.
Spam for EMEA has focused on making money or investing it. Pump and dump stock scams abound, as criminals hope to entice suckers into inflating a penny stock's price, and grabbing gains before the victims realize they have been had.
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Tags: Microsoft, Zero Day, Spam
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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