WMF Flaw not a Backdoor

koro666 writes "In a blog post, Mark Russinovich from SysInternals responded to the allegations made by Steve Gibson labeling the flaw as an intentional backdoor. It seems that the hype was about Steve's discovery that the code would only be executed if the size of the metafile record was deliberately tampered with, which is not the case. The technical details are explained in his post."

Comments

Why would Microsoft add a backdoor?

[Anonymous Coward]

They control the friggin operating system, and everyone has to trust their code without seeing the source. Security patches are provided on a near-weekly basis for people to download. They can install whatever code they want, or probe the user's hard drive through the frontdoor which users have to keep unlocked just for them.

Then there's the creepy "Tell Microsoft about the problem" button on the dialog that comes up whenever a GUI application (from any vendor, not just Microsoft) crashes - I bet their marketing folks get lots of good information on what apps people use on a regular basis, how they're being used and what frustrations their users are having. I'll bet that none of the information is passed along by Microsoft to Adobe or Corel or whoever wrote the app. Now that's evil.... Steve Gibson should be writing about that.