Microsoft has released what they are rating as a critical patch for the Vector Markup Language. This is a public exploit that people were talking about last week.
For Service Pack 2 of Windows XP it will update the following files:
Vgx.dll | 6.0.2900.2997 | 18-Sep-2006 | 14:15 | 851,968 | SP2GDR |
Vgx.dll | 6.0.2900.2997 | 18-Sep-2006 | 14:28 | 851,968 | SP2QFE |
Mitigating Factors:
- In all cases an attacker would have no way to force users to visit these Web sites. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade users to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link in an e-mail message or instant messenger message that takes users to the attacker's Web site.
- In an e-mail based attack of this exploit, customers who read e-mail using Outlook Express on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, are at less risk from this vulnerability because Binary and Script Behaviors is disabled by default in the Restricted sites zone. Outlook 2003 and 2007 should be doing this as well.
- 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.
Take these into consideration when juding your individual risk. My personal opinion is that Microsoft needs to add an additional level of criticality so that these "very important" updates are seperated from one that are truely wormable and are rights elevation exploits....those are the true criticals because they pose a much greater risk to users.
Posted
Sep 26 2006, 02:24 PM
by
Josh Phillips
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