Zero-Day Team Launches with Emergency IE Patch

Holy Mother of Thor writes to mention an eWeek article about a third-party patch for Internet Explorer. A dark horse security group formed after the WMF attacks in late 2005, the ZERT (Zero Day Emergency Response Team) has released a patch to attempt to slow the malware attacks on Windows. From the article: "'It is clear that we are dealing with an underground group of people who are writing exploits for profits. They are waiting for Patch Tuesday to pass, then it becomes Exploit Wednesday. We're seeing these zero-days in the wild, timed precisely to guarantee at least an entire month to spread,' Stewart said in an interview with eWEEK. Stewart, who is volunteering his reverse-engineering skills and time to ZERT in his private capacity, wrote an early version of the VML (Vector Markup Language) patch the group released Sept. 22 and worked closely with others to fine-tune the update to minimize potential glitches."

Comments

Re:Spyware Thursday

[teh_chrizzle]

i used to work on the helpdesk of a large manufaturer of insulation. they took two weeks to "test" MS patches before deploying them. i use the term test rather loosely, since the testing went something like this:

• phase 1: "steve, install the new updates on your PC."
• phase 2: "hey steve, did your PC blow up from those updates?"
• phase 3: "hey steve, go ahead and roll out those updates to 10,000 PCs scattered across the continental united states."

they did the rollouts on monday as part of the users' login scripts. monday morning just happens to be when everyone is returning from vacations, or business trips, or delivering the world's most important report/proposal/presentation. everyone got 4 chances to cancel those updates before they were forced to install. so the monday after "patch tuesday" was called "crippled network monday" and if you do the math, 4 cancellations means the stragglers got updated on "force-it friday", when everyone was getting ready to go on vacations, business trips, and preparing to deliver the world's most important report/proposal/presentation.