MS Critical Patch Fixes 8 Vulnerabilities

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @04:39AM from the your-server-is-sick dept.

nandemoari writes "A hole allowing hackers to take control of Microsoft Exchange was just one 'critical' issue the Redmond-based company promises it has fixed with a patch correcting a total of eight vulnerabilities in its programs, including the Internet Explorer browser, Office, and its SQL Server. Three of the eight vulnerabilities patched yesterday were marked 'critical.' The most concerning is an issue with Exchange that would allow attackers to take over an Exchange server by simply forwarding a carefully crafted message to a corporate mail server. Microsoft has admitted that the vulnerability can be exploited when a user opens or previews an email in the Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF)."

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Re:Why can't Microsoft ever get this right? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-02-11 05:42 · Score: 5, Informative

Why in the world would an e-mail delivery system ever consider executing external code?
Exploits such as the ones mentioned aren't because the system is executing external code intentionally, rather, a carefully crafted message will overflow a buffer and change the values of some CPU registers. If the values change in such a way that a pointer moves execution to a part of the carefully crafted message, that message is now external code that is being run.