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Windows Vulnerability in Animated Cursor Handling
MoreDruid writes "Secunia reports a vulnerability in Windows Animated Cursor Handling. According to the linked article, the rating is "extremely critical". Microsoft has put up their own advisory on the subject, confirming this is a vulnerability that affects Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. The exploit has already been used in the wild. From the Secunia page: The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in the handling of animated cursors and can e.g. be exploited by tricking a user into visiting a malicious website using Internet Explorer or opening a malicious e-mail message. Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code."
So much for Vista being secure from the ground up!
Huh? This boggles the imagination. I would have thought they'd have learned about security rings while rebuilding their entire OS from the ground up (as Longhorn was reputed to do).
With exploits as old as this one, it makes me wonder just how many high level hackers/crackers have used this in silence over the years. It could pay very well to keep ploits such as this one silent for as long as possible.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Some stupid consumer protection council reports that some part of some toy can come apart and present a choking hazard to children. "As many as 3 children could have died over the last 10 years because of this!" Suddenly all news organizations act as though the sky has fallen, and on slow news day, it is even the lead story! Here we have a hazard that could get your machine rooted and pwned and steal your password and sell it in the organized crime networks, ... and the world reacts with a collective shrug.
Sorry, for the rant, I know I am preaching to the choir, just need to get it off my chest.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's fine for you, but have you seen an average consumer machine recently? Everything from animated wallpaper to rotating slide shows to OMGPONIES!!!!!! themes get installed - usually via Active X.
You _are not_ the average user - the statement you made above proves that. The 'average joe' thinks his computer is appliance, like a toaster, because Bill Gates tells him it is.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
I'll own up and admit to having used exclusively animated cursors in the past... but then again, I was a mouthbreathing teenager in the mid 1990s with my first Pentium. I also had Star Trek WAVs hooked to all my Windows events, ran After Dark's screensaver app at all times, used any excuse to look things up Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia CD-ROM, and obsessively hoarded Voyager publicity photos from Compuserve. A few blinky wiggly pointers shaped like phasers and lightsabers were the least of my crimes against good taste, but frankly, I would have totally deserved getting owned as a result.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I was going to try to be calm and rational about this, but screw it.
It's that kind of piss-poor attitude by jackass codemonkeys that causes these stupid, avoidable problems. If you aspire to be a programmer, quit now. You are not suited for it, and the best you can hope for is working in the field for a few years before your coworkers stab you to death in the parking lot (and no one will see a thing).
You can either approach every single line of code you write by asking how it will be attacked, or you can write an OS that can be compromised by a damn mouse pointer. There is no in between. All the hoping and wishing and "gee whiz golly, no one would want to hack my code!" Pollyanna naivete in the world won't change it.
Seriously. Quit before you break something.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If you told me it was in the Aero "glass" interface, I'd be more amused. Not that the eye-candy is worth exposing a machine to security risks, but the new interface could improve user efficiency, or be a step in that direction - I'll accept the risk presented as a step along the way to a better interface.
If it was something in the kernel or one of the system utilities, I'd accept that. Hundreds of executables, thousands of source files, millions of lines of code - sure, I can see somebody missing a bug in "ipconfig" or something like that - happens to every OS eventually.
The vulnerability has to do with handling animated mouse cursors?!? Uh, how the )$(*% do you screw up mouse event handling badly enough to permit an OS exploit? Just how important are animated mouse cursors to the end-user experience? Important enough to risk OS/system stability and integrity to have a spinning hourglass?
I'll say this for Redmond - this vulnerability certainly has a huge "Wow" factor in my opinion. It's all about the "Wow", you know . . .
If root gets pwned, you cannot trust your system OR your data. It could have put a trojan or backdoor in and you'll never know. You will now have to reinstall your system, reinstall your applications, reconfigure your system and then load your data from backup.
However, if a user account is pwned, you cannot trust your data. Either scan or load from backup.
So that's why you don't want "root" compromised.
And that is without going in to things you just can't DO as a normal user (raw sockets or even bind to ports 1024)...
Although I use Linux exclusively at home/work, here I am, silly fool, giving the benefit of the doubt to Vista and its "enhanced security". I've always been aware IE's ability to create holes in the most unrelated portions of the OS (cursor, help pages, etc) and yet, I thought that Vista, maybe, just maybe actually was worth its 5+years of development and it was not all spent in DRM crap. How foolish of me. Here is yet again another seemingly unrelated functionality affected by the disaster that is IE. I will not be surprised if tomorrow IE can make your desk lamp vulnerable.
[alk]
The Microsoft Advisory - whom we all trust - shows that the fuzz here in /. is unnecessary.
RTMF (Read The Mitigating Factors) !:
In a Web-based attack scenario, an attacker would have to host a Web site that contains a Web page that is used to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker could also attempt to compromise a Web site to have it serve up a Web page with malicious content attempting to exploit this vulnerability. An attacker would have no way to force users to visit a Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link that takes them to the attacker's site or a site compromised by the attacker.
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.
See, much ado about nothing !:
- the attacker would have to host a web site [surely, they couldn't, could they !]
- the attacker could compromise a web site [probably they would not know how to, would they !]
- the attacker has no way to force the user to visit a specific website [see !]
Especially the latter gave me complete relief and peace of mind ! I can't be forced, that means I am as good as safe ! Yahoo !
- the attacker would need to persuade us [just told my wife not to answer the phone or door bell]
Not running my web browser as administrator [I don't] seriously limits the potential damage, thanks to Vista's unique feature of unprivileged user accounts.
Thanks, Microsoft, for an informative advisory; and a comprehensive and clear list of mitigating factors !
Thanks, Microsoft, for debunking so-called "extremely critical" vulnerabilities as myth, again !