Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Bypass IE Protected Mode
Trailrunner7 writes "A new paper from researchers at Verizon Business identifies a method through which an attacker can bypass Internet Explorer Protected Mode and gain elevated privileges once he's successfully exploited a bug on the system. Protected Mode in Internet Explorer is one of a handful of key security mechanisms that Microsoft has added to Windows in the last few years. It is often described as a sandbox, in that it is designed to prevent exploitation of a vulnerability in the browser from leading to more persistent compromise of the underlying system. In their research, the Verizon Business team found a method that, when combined with an existing memory-corruption vulnerability in the browser, enables an attacker to bypass Protected Mode and elevate his privileges on the compromised machine (PDF). The technique enables the attacker to move from a relatively un-privileged level to one with higher privileges, giving him complete access to the logged-in user's account."
The whole point of a sandbox is to add another layer that the attacker has to punch through before getting root access to the computer. From what I gather it's chaining together multiple vulnerabilities to gain control. First bypassing the potected mode then gaining administrative control over the computer.
Assuming I'm reading things correctly that's to be expected. The real news is that MS' approach of letting security fixes ripen before release has caused what was bad to be far worse. Of course by real news I mean something that's known to everybody except MS.