Slashdot Mirror
Windows .ANI Problem Surfaced Two Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new twist to the tale of Windows .ANI exploit, that's been in the news all week (including when a spam campaign used the teaser of nude Britney Spears pictures to lure people to malicious sites). InformationWeek reports the Windows .ANI bug at issue first surfaced — and was patched — two years ago, in early 2005. 'If they had simply looked for other references for the same piece of code when they originally dealt with it a few years ago, they would have found this and patched it in 2005,' says Craig Schmugar of McAfee. 'It would have saved a whole lot of people a lot of time, money and effort.' Microsoft claims this .ANI vulnerability is different from the old, but beyond that they're not talking."
when a spam campaign used the teaser of nude Britney Spears pictures to lure people to malicious sites
Talk about an anti-virus.
If all attempts to hijack my machine involved using her as a lure, I'd uninstall AVP in a heartbeat; you couldn't pay me to see her nude.
The last time I saw an ANSI bug was during my days as a BBS Sysop years ago!
an .ANL exploit?
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Of course this
Steve, leave the slashdot editors alone. If you need to blow off steam, go throw a chair or something.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The thing that bugs me the most about these kinds of issues is the reporting of them in the media.
If you read the slashdot summary (or even the whole first page of the article), you get the impression that some people think the bug is pretty much the same thing as the 2005 one and that Microsoft disagrees. The story is structured like a "He said, she said," kind of thing and no one is painted as right or wrong. If you *do* manage to make it to the second page of the article however, you find out that several very respected security professionals and security companies present detailed compelling evidence to the effect that Microsoft is both incompetent and disingenuous in their opinion on this bug.
It is the same bug (essentially) reported in 2005, and it should have been caught in a matter of hours or even minutes after the 2005 bug was initially reported to them. This by reason of Microsoft's own self-stated bug hunting and code modification procedures.
The conclusion is absolutely inescapable that Microsoft completely failed to follow their own basic rules of coding and security auditing here. They also are lying or at the very least splitting hairs about it being a "separate issue," and they seem to be deliberately trying to pull the wool over peoples eyes about it. Yet this story has been reported around the web as a kind of "maybe McAfee is right, or maybe Microsoft is right," thing for the most part??? Why?
On top of all of that, this is yet another (of about three instances I have found so far), where it's clear that Vista is not "all new code" as MS likes to maintain it is. It seems like this bug occurred because the same old *.ani code from the previous versions of MS Windows was included in Vista with literally no oversight and no checking.
Why do people buy products from these people again?
And why do they always seem get the benefit of the doubt in the media?
How many other people clicked on the "teaser of nude Britney Spears pictures" link in the Slashdot story and were bitterly disappointed?
this is useless without pictures
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Does anyone have a link to any information that actually explains how thi exploit works?
Here you go: Analysis of ANI "anih" Header Stack Overflow Vulnerability
Basically, an animated cursor is just one way to exploit a problem with Windows' GDI (graphical device interface) implementation. Windows runs this as part of the user's session and it is, in part, in kernel mode. Just like Jon Ellch and David Maynor showed with the Apple wireless driver exploit, if you can get access to the kernel, you can do pretty much anything you want. Any code you run will no longer be limited to the permissions of your user account.
J Wolfgang Goerlich
http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5XP0515L5 W.html
But this issue has not been caused by a mere bug. It's been caused by a catastrophic design flaw in Windows itself (which I personally believe is a side-effect of Microsoft's marketing strategy) - and that is that EVERYTHING is in the kernel. In UNIXes, the GUI is nowhere near the kernel. There is no hope in hell in a UNIX environment of a mouse cursor taking control of your computer. This is caused by the fact that the GUI in windows runs partly in kernel mode. It's the architecture's fault.
If you ask me, this goes right down to the name of the OS - "Windows". It says it all. "This operating system is based on the GUI". And it literally is. The side-effect is that the GUI itself (the windows) can attack your computer.
The analysis you link to does not mention the kernel. It's true that some GDI is in kernel land, but a surprising amount of resource access, like this, is not. The exploit, in its current form, is firmly in the userland part, and constrained by the security tokens of the thread and process. That's often bad enough, though.