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Two Unofficial IE Patches Block Attacks
Pentrex writes "eWeek reports that two well-respected Internet security companies (eEye and Determina) have released unofficial patches to correct the vulnerability being exploited to load spyware, bots and Trojan downloaders on Windows machines. Microsoft isn't sanctioning the third-party patches, which include source code for review. As always, the advice is to weigh the risks before opting for an unofficial hotfix."
Why doesn't Microsoft just tell people to switch to Ubuntu and use Firefox? It would save them a hassle and a lot of work.
Maybe because they like money?
There's two other patches out there that work pretty damn well:
1 and 2.
The question is, would people patch if they had to pay for them?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Are you related to my girlfriend? Because she asks smart questions like you. =)
As always, the advice is to weigh the risks before opting for an unofficial hotfix.
Is this not something that smart admins/companies so even with official patches and fixes? To me, the fact that the source was released shows that these people are quite serious about being taken seriously. I suppose that is better than MS assurances that they extensively tested the fix before release.
I don't even understand how they manage to *write* third-party patches. I mean, it must be hard as hell to do without the IE source code. I think they write a separate DLL which acts as an intermediary to the flawed insecure library or something, but it sounds like an enormous pain-in-the-ass process. Or do these companies have access to MS code through Shared Source program or something?
Yep, the more I watch the ills that befall the Microsoft-bound, the more I'm happy with my decision to go Linux-only a few years back.
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Of course, I'll probably be retired before they're out.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Certainly you should weigh the risks with any patch but since an "official" patch would come from the originators of the flaw (and numerous others) why should it be considered any better than an "unofficial" patch? At least these patches can be scrutinized by the outside world for problems. A MS patch will be forever hidden. The perils of closed source!
Given the fact that the average IE user would not even be aware of the flaw, how would he even know such third party patches even exist?
Most of them are going to be patched only when MS releases the patch, AND they have selected to be updated automatically.
Its a horrible situation.
If third parties can regularly patch your bugs before you do, without access to the source, after giving you a generous head start... Well, I guess that could mean a lot of things. They're definitely lazy, to say the least.
True, it's not like they sell IE seperate. They have no real reason to be so die-hard about IE.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I had our IT department test and deploy the silent installation this morning. We're a web-based software company and there's been zero reported impact to our development staff as 6pm EST.
While it's clearly not the best solution, it does work and provides a much needed layer for the vast majority of corporations who simply cannot and will not disable active script.
Microsoft releases one patch day a month because their corporate customers, the lion's share of their market, demand it. And they demand it because "release a million little patches as soon as that individual patch is done" is unworkable in a corporate environment. You can plan around one big patch a month -- the magic word is "scheduled downtime". It is less bad for some customers to be periodically marginally more vulnerable for a period of two weeks or so then to be continusouly vulnerable to unscheduled downtime due to patching. "Publish early and often" works well with an enthusiast running one machine but when you've got an IT department overseeing a cast of thousands spread over 14 time zones things get a little more dicey.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Anybody who has the ability to weigh risks is already using firefox.
Do you have ESP?
the patch fixes the affected DLL in memory by overwriting a byte that is stored in RAM for MSHTML.DLL this begs a freaking question, should a modern OS even allow some application to modify behaviour of another application in memory, especially behaviour of a system level application, an OS DLL? I believe the patch needs to be installed from an administrator account, but even then, this doesn't mean that it is good design decision, to allow an arbitrary application to overwrite in memory code of another application. Of-course if that wasn't possible this specific patch couldn't exist, but still, the OS allows questionable application behaviour to say the least.
You can't handle the truth.
Microsoft views IE as a "rich client" and one more reason to tie people to Windows. MS may one day have a 100% standards compliant browser but I gaurentee they will also have another 20% worth of features that only work in IE as one more way to try and keep people using Windows.
It's the same reason they will never have a Linux version of Office as long as they view Linux as any kind of threat to their OS.
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Damn, I wish I had mod points for your post. 'Course it would be modded funny, but hey ...
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Does anyone remember the previous third-party patch to IE? This is from December of '03.
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It would be interesting to see microsfts official patch when it becomes availible and attempt to see how close it is to these unofficial patches.
Maybe the code would be completley different but would it achieve its goal by going about the same ways as the unofficial patch? Or would it be patched on a level deeper then we could access. I guess the most interesting part would be that a third party without access to the source code could actualy come together with a solution before microsoft. What would be more interesting is seeing how close those solutions match match each other. Sort of a test to how these third party programers can predict the neccesity or orders of different code they only have limited access to.
For x86 assembler, Intel is a good source of information: http://www.intel.com/design/Pentium4/documentation .htm#manuals. You'll want to check out volumes 2A and 2B at a minimum for reference material.
I would be surprised if Alexander used the Visual Studio debugger; more likely he used SoftICE or one of the Windows debuggers (NTSD/CDB/KD/WinDbg). SoftICE is a commercial product sold by Compuware and provides both user-mode and kernel-mode debugging. A version of the NTSD debugger comes with Windows, but is less useful than the one that comes with Debugging Tools for Windows. NTSD and CDB provide user-mode debugging, the only difference between the applications being that NTSD opens a new console window and CDB does not. KD is the kernel debugger. WinDbg provides the same functionality as NTSD/CDB/KD but with a (spartan) Windows interface.
There's also the rather significant problem of Firefox not being a drop-in replacement for IE.
It's the same reason they will never have a Linux version of Office as long as they view Linux as any kind of threat to their OS.
OS X is a vastly greater "threat" to Windows than Linux is on the Desktop, but Microsoft are happy to make money selling Office for OS X. Your argument does not hold water.
Win 3.1 was an (admitedly significant) upgrade of 3.0 which they charged for.
Similarly 98 was incremental on 95, 98SE on 98, Me on 98SE all of which you had to pay for yet none of which offered significantly more than bug fixes & drivers.
That's my point.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Not in a pinch, but regularly. You can't monitor a WSUS server without it.
Of course, IE on that particular network has a proxy server of 127.0.0.1 pushed out via group policy, with an exemption for the intranet. You could sneak around that by installing a proxy server on the machine you're using, but most of my users aren't that sharp. I've got Firefox 1.5.whatever running on everything now, so I can let my users off the leash a little.
The only thing I miss about IE is the ability to push settings to the browser via group policy. It's nice to be able to centrally manage an application like that. I haven't found a way to do that for firefox (HINT HINT).
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I wonder how this makes Microsoft feel, and imagine the embarassment from having 3rd parties release hot fixes (work arounds, or patches) before your release cycle.
It's like the security community is slapping them in the face and saying that their current model of using patch cycles is not good enough for threats on todays internet.
In my opinion this makes Microsoft look very bad, this is that I know of the second time a patch has been released for an MS product before an official fix release.
And they even produce sourcecode for community scrutiny/review.
To eEye and others making these patches for MS products, thanks guys for making sure my parents don't get inundated by malware.
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